zidoo Z20 PRO 4K Media Player, RTD1619BPD 4G+32G, HDR10+ Set Top Box, 4K HDR Android 11 TV Box, Support Ethernet WiFi, NAS, HDD Bay up to 16TB

Very pleased
After dipping my toe into the water by purchasing the Zidoo Z9X 8K- 8K HDR Media Player a while ago, I decided to step up to this product. Yes, I know that the previous product is 8k and this is 4k, but that difference isn’t relevant.It took me a while to get the earlier product connected to my home’s WiFi system but since I had gone through that process once, getting this new product connected was a breeze.The only disappointment on the previous product was what led me to this one. My ripped movie collection was loaded onto a 12TB internal hard drive. The previous product came with a SATA cable to connect the hard drive to the product but this meant that I had to have the hard drive sitting on top or to the side of the player during use, which was awkward and not appealing from a visual viewpoint. I purchased the present product mainly because it has an internal bay that houses the internal hard drive, placing it out of site with no unsightly connecting cable.When first using the product it will take a while for the player’s software to index and obtain the cover art for your individual movies but this is just a one-time process unless you later add some new movies. The older data is already stored so only the newer content is added and this is a fast process. The only hassle when first scanning your collection is that it seems to assume that the movie you have is the most recent release of a movie with a particular title. For example, you may have an earlier version of Anna Katenina with Greta Garbo but the software shows the cover art and movie info of the most recent release of a movie with that same title. Making a correction requires you to go into the software menu and choose the “re-match” function and then pick the correct version of the movie to display but the good news is that you only have to correct it once. The cover art is bright and vibrant in the menu and loads and scrolls pretty quickly without lagging. To be honest, I get a lot of entertainment just scrolling through the menu and seeing movies pictured that I had forgotten were in my collection.There are a number of adjustments that can be made to the player’s functions but frankly I have not needed to tweak it much, finding it mainly a pretty simple plug and play device once the indexing and cover art has been uploaded and stored.For anyone considering a purchase, keep in mind that this is a player of media you already have downloaded and stored on a separate hard drive that does not come with the player. It is not a burner, a streamer or a downloading device, which some of the other reviewers seemed to have assumed.

Largely useless
Yes, you can install a hard drive inside, but every time you try to copy a file to it, it fails at 4gb which renders it pretty much useless. Ripping a 4k dvd take up 50-100gb space, for example. You can play files over network but I bought this specifically because it was advertised as having an internal hard drive.If you connect an external drive it might work or it might not. Or it might only work when plugged into a USB 2 socket and not into USB 3. Or after awhile it might stop being able to mount and only show as “safely ejected” forever and only get fixed if you delete all data and reformat it (has nothing to do with the actual drive – zidoo just randomly decides to remember the drive as ejected).Random crashes constantly and everywhere. Disappearing sound that can only get fixed by rebooting. Files on disks randomly appearing and then disappearing and appearing again.And if that wasn’t bad enough, its format support is very poor too: it can’t play divx/xvid videos for example.

Very fast
So far so good. Pretty fast overall and can connect to my HDs without any issues.

Too many glitches
After being disappointed with Zapitti I decided to try Zidoo. Right from the start it would reboot two or three times while trying to start up. When I did get it to work it would reboot while trying to play HDR-10 content. Lastly I could not see my hard drive over the network. Granted Zapitti was slow but this was unexpected. I will say when I can get a movie to play the picture quality is far superior to Zapitti. Maybe I received a faulty unit. But as of now I’m not impressed