Has anyone had much experience with using something like a Sofabaton X1s ( or other such as Harmony, etc) universal remotes with Zidoo products? I have a Z9X 8K arriving today likely but I have been having so many HDMI-CEC issues with attaching things to my Bravia X90J lately, that I am almost positive are all CEC related that I am thinking of just disabling CEC across the board and going with a universal remote. The Sofabaton is sold at a nearby electronics store and seems like a decent option. Has anyone here had much experience with a universal programmable remote and Zidoo products? Was the setup easy to setup? Do you know of one model that maybe works better than others? Thank you.
Well, my Zidoo Z9X 8K arrived and the setup so far has been 100% flawless. I am amazed, actually. I expected so many headaches based on my recent battles to get a soundbar connected along with my Nvidia Shield. I came home and disconnected the Shield and swapped in the Zidoo and immediately the TV switched to that hdmi input and the device walked me through two updates and then I was off to the races. It's scanning in my TV and Movie library right now and it's almost done. So far there are ZERO unmatched items. While that is pleasantly surprising, I am not totally shocked about that part as everything that goes into my library on my NAS gets renamed and scraped by TMM first. So I don't typically have any file matching issues. I did test a couple of movies out and I have to say the PQ on this device is amazing. 4K DV LOTR looks so good! So far I am loving this device and the setup has been smooth as butter. At first I thought oh maybe CEC is disabled on the Zidoo, but it's not. I can use my smaller Sony remote with it as well and the soundbar. That was surprising. I was sure that since I had no input issues during setup that maybe CEC was something I had to enable first (I know it supports it), but that was not the case. I'll likely still use the supplied remote quite often as it's decent, is backlit but also has way more nerd knobs than the Sony one. Seems I might not need to bother with a universal remote after all. So far, so good!
I use my old Onkyo A/V universal remote, what was awesome for me is I already had it programmed to my Zappiti 4K Media player, and all the codes are exactly the same for Zidoo! No reprogramming involved. I get a bonus as well because I had next and previous chapter programmed with the Zappiti and it works with the Zidoo as well. I mention this because the Zidoo remote doesn't have a next and previous chapter option (lots of people complained about it initially).
Next/Previous Chapter are by default programmed to the PgUp/PgDn keys and the Up/Down D-Pad keys. This can be changed in Function Keys in Settings.
Does the Zidoo remote have a skip forward X seconds, where X is usually something like 30 seconds? I rely heavily on that button when using Plex. Especially if I want to skip through content that I know is very short, like an ad or something.
I've used several Home Theater Master MX500s over the years for my home theater, man cave and wife's TV setup. They are "universal" remotes in the sense that they can be taught IR commands from other IR remotes and can be set up to control several different devices, not just one. Some "universal" remotes are pre-programmed to mimic a large number of other remotes but only once device can be controlled at a time. It is a basically simple but time-consuming process to "teach" each button on the HTM remote to send the same signals as each matching button on the "source" remotes, but largely works well. The MX500s can also be taught "macros" that allow you to chain several commands together. I use these to do things like having one button turn on my TV, my A/V receiver and my UHD disc player and set the A/V receiver to the appropriate HDMI in put for that disc player. I do that for each of my main source devices. I also have one button that turns EVERYTHING off. Of course, that only works if the source remote has discrete Power On and Power Off signals, something the Zidoo Z9X 8K (and other Zidoo devices, I believe) do not have. One shortcoming of the MX500 is that you can "press and hold" a button on the Zidoo remote and that can trigger a different action than a simple tap on that same button, and the MX500 just can't mimic that. Oh well. The MAJOR shortcoming of the MX500 is that it went out of production years ago. Another company bought the rights to make and sell a clone of it but even they stopped making them. Bummer! It was and continues to be a great remote!
I use a HARMONY ULTIMATE ONE hub in my HT with a Z9X currently. Soon, I'll be adding a Z9X 8K as my every day driver. I'm going to keep my OG box in the setup solely for 3D movies. I plan to simply replicate my movie activity on another A/V input and call it "3D" and simply swap one box over and put the new ZIDOO where the original was. If I use the hard ON/OFF button to keep the original box off until I need it for the rare 3D feature, then I'm assuming that I should be up and running for every day use fairly quickly. I am assuming that there are no remote code changes between the boxes.
crtzulee; I had a Z9X Pro for a bit but found it wanting for audio files and sent it back, getting the Z9X 8K a while later. Since I never had both at the same time, I can't confirm that they both use the same codes for remotes. However, it seems like the remotes for both did pretty much the exact same things so I'm guessing they didn't bother changing to new codes. Good luck with the Harmony. I just threw an old Harmony away because Logitech pulled the plug on supporting it (not surprising, I'd had it for several years) and I could no longer update it using the Windows-based app. That was SO much easier than "teaching" a universal learning remote every last control, button by button!
As a bit of a "poweruser", I was late to finally accept a universal remote. But the complexity of my HT was getting the better of some family members so I finally caved... now that my brain has turned to mush, I can't live without my harmony and have been worried about what I'm going to do once these five up the ghost. Voice integration with my google home stopped working a couple of months back but I'm still able to use both the windows and Android app to access items that are in the database. ..
