zidoo Z9X PRO 4K HDR Media Player, 4K Android TV Box, Android 11 OS, RTD1619BPD Quad-core 64bit Processor 4G+32G, VS10 Image Quality Engine, HDR10+MKV, for Video & Audio Playback

Good functionality, lousy remote
At the end of last year, I set up a NAS to stream movies so I wouldn’t have to mess with finding the right disk. I was originally using jellyfin to manage the streaming, but I had a lot of issues (sound playing in the wrong language, subtitles not working). So I gave up on that and bought the zidoo instead.Setup was a breeze and I don’t have any of the issues I was having with jellyfin. It does have trouble sometimes with figuring out the movie metadata; I’ve had a number of movies where either it showed as the wrong movie or it didn’t find anything at all. Fortunately, it’s easy to log in to the device from my desktop and search for the correct metadata. I think part of the issue is that many of the movie filenames have underscores rather than spaces and the software doesn’t seem to work without spaces.Using it, my main complaint is the remote; everything is very dark and it’s difficult to find the button I want, especially when I’m using my projector and have the lights down low. I end up turning on lights just so I can find the button I want. I’ve also had a few occasions where I got stuck in a field on the settings screen and couldn’t get out. If the remote and settings were just a little easier to use, this would be a five star device.Overall? It’s kind of expensive for a device that’s just replacing a free app, but for my use case it works better than anything else I tried, and it’s not too expensive compared to the cost of the NAS and the movies themselves. I wish the remote was better (I’m probably going to end up looking for a universal remote that can work with it) but other than that I’m pretty happy with the purchase.

Does not work!
Where do I start? It’s total garbage, starting with the remote. It’s a dark charcoal gray, and the symbols on the buttons are like maybe 1/100th of a shade lighter, you can’t make them out even if you shine a flashlight on it.I have a 4K tv, but it would only play movies in 1080p, it takes forever to scan all your movies, while Plex and Jellyfin take like a minute, tops. Videos constantly stutter and drop audio, you have to pause and re-start to stop it, but it only fixed it for less than a minute before it would start again.I reset to factory specs and had to go through the whole scanning thing all over again, but it still did everything I mentioned above, only the stuttering got worse. Oh, and way too many movies were assigned the wrong posters and synopses. For example there was one called “The Gardens of Paradise” with a weird graphic, I had no idea what it was, and I had to play the beginning of the movie (which took forever because of the stuttering and freezing) to discover it was the movie “Lucy”, then you have to jump through hoops to find and load the correct poster and movie description. Unbelievable.The shame is, for the brief moment that it worked as it should, the picture and audio quality were subperb.I complained to Amazon and they immediately sent me a new one, but I’m not even going to open the box. I want my $266 back.

The most brilliant feature of the Zidoo is its VS-10 Dolby Vision engine. This is capable of outputting DV to any HDR device, even ones that don’t support DV.I recently purchased a Samsung OLED TV. It’s a beautiful device, but has one glaring shortcoming – Samsung doesn’t support Dolby Vision HDR. I was going to return the TV, but then i discovered this Zidoo. The picture quality this player provides brings my TV to a whole new level of brilliance.There are some major limitations with this device. It is not certified by the major players, so streaming services only provide low bitrate streams – DVD quality at best. Likewise, you can’t hook up a Bluray player and play retail discs. There are licensing issues that prevent any of this from working.What you can do is fill a hard drive with 1:1 rips of UHD or Bluray discs, and play those back through the Zidoo Dolby Engine. With this usecase, you’ll get an incredible picture that you could only get with more expensive and limited devices like the HDFury Vertex.You need two devices to maximize the capabilities of today’s TV’s – one for streaming, and one for local playback. For local playback, Zidoo is in a field by itself. It’s that good.

I had one before and it was awesome, this new one is really nice however does not support 120hz at 4k, only 60. However must movies are 60hz except for the very fast action movies and sports that use 120hz.

Amazing device if you store your MKV file locally – does everything I want and plays all my MKVs smoothly with frame matching.