Hi community, 1st time Zidoo purchase/user.....Z9x pro. Experience so far as a player for my local media..... Absolutely brilliant, every video and audio codec is played back flawlessly.... Can't ask for much more than that in terms of a "MEDIA PLAYER" But in terms of a Android box / Home theatre interface, this device is lacking majorly in layout and customisation especially from an Android device. IMHO - anyone buying a player like this, customisation is the most 2nd important thing next to playback compatibility and when it comes to customisation nothing comes close to Kodi..... Period. I use Jellyfin (docker) on my Unraid server to do all the heavy lifting and it works flawlessly, so so happy making that move in so many respects. But trying to find a device with the playback capabilities of Zidoo with a true android / Kodi experience is bloody next to impossible it seems. Had a Nvidia shield pro 2019 which was ok but f$*K Android TV, I'm not interested in your constant advertising! And it's playback capabilities compared to this zidoo device....not even close! So far my journey on making Kodi usable on a zidoo has been a constant battle to say the least (not surprised given what I'd read before the purchase). I thought I had it all sorted, ZDMC 20.2, Jellyfin for Kodi, Aeon MQ 9 (WOW what a skin, heavy but WOW). But after a few days of usage the drawbacks arose. Now, I can put up with the lag of opening libraries because KODI is worth it. Especially when opening the music library, almost a 40+ seconds before it would display, yes all to do with the skin, but the shield pro was excellent in that department same library in a matter of seconds. Point I'm trying to make is that Kodi as a whole is worth the lag. The major drawbacks was Jellyfin for Kodi, nothing was getting synced regarding watched/resume/etc because of the Zidoo player is not native to Kodi which leads to the other drawbacks, NO play next episode, skip back 10sec when paused, basically none of the playback features one expects from Kodi. I have tried so many different things to get the best of all worlds, sadly each 1 having some sort of limitation / draw back rendering it not fit for my purpose. 1 of the more interesting test scenarios I had, which I have not seen mentioned anywhere to date was when I installed the standard Jellyfin for Android APK and selected external media player I was given the option to use "Gallery app" which was indeed the Zidoo player. I would have kept this setup only the Jellyfin for Android APK was not setup for use with a remote as it would be in the Android TV version. The TV version of Jellyfin felt very dumbed down and very unappealing tbh. This leads me to thinking in my next test when I return from work in a few weeks, I will install the standard Kodi for Android in the hope it gives me that same option for "gallery app" but something tells me I will have all the same issues as mentioned above regarding loss of features when not using Kodi's built in player. Also sadly I'm not interested in Zidoo's HT4 etc, it's ok but miles behind Kodi, It's like why re-invented the wheel, Kodi does it way better that Zidoo will every do and that will never change. If zidoo spent the same amount of time and resources into making Kodi work fluently as they did into HT4 they would dominate this market and many others IMHO. Anyway hope this helps anyone considering buying Zidoo in the future and if anybody has anything to add here OR correct me wrong on my findings, it would be very welcomed.
thanks for sharing your experience. I've also reported 20 or 30 ideas / wishes / functionalities / basics to get some rudimentary working library out of ht4. so many things are just not working like updates, recognizing of titles, episodes and series, searching, actors and related movies directors, subs, navigation.... I'm not so into kodi it's to much work for me but I like my emby a lot it's also lightyears ahead of ht4 and here it also doesn't work so same struggles like you ... the one thing I'm really happy with is the picture quality. dv looks just great
@supermood Thanks for your reply. I have never used Emby but I can imagine it would be of a very high calibre given Jellyfin is a fork of Emby. I totally agree, WOW.... the picture quality of DV content on the Zidoo/LG G3 is absolutely amazing. I forgot to mention that before, its what drives me to make the player work in my setup. Sadly your reply does not give me much hope that I will achieve my desires though, one can only hope!
yeah hope dies last! I don't have any - but I realized that the whole topic is not important for me anymore. I've tried and posted and even started a wishlist here but now I don't think I care anymore. the way to relaxation and luck is to get rid of all the technology and attachments and to go hiking in a nice forest greetings from the alps
Your 1 smart cookie, I could not agree with you more...... Connect with nature! So many times I just want to scrap the lot of it and just enjoy life with absolutely nothing. Why is technology always a disappointment.... Because it won't be profitable
