zidooZ9X 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

First off, this needs to be said because any negative review of this product seems to stem from its incompatibility with streaming services. The Zidoo is NOT meant to be used as a streaming service box. It is meant for local streaming. If you know anything about what you’re buying and care and know enough about high fidelity A/V, you should know this going in. If you want a box to play your compressed, bitrate starved streaming services, buy a Shield. Onto the review: this is the best local media playback device in it’s class that money can buy. Period, end of story. Having used a Shield for many years thinking it was the best (for awhile it was) I can tell you that the both the audio and video playback quality of the Zidoo blows the Shield so far out of the water it’s an embarrassment for Nvidia. I felt like I was watching my content for the first time, and truly HEARING the punch of the soundtracks and scores of my films for the first time ever. I didn’t even realize how much the shield was destroying the fidelity of the audio of my films until I bought the Zidoo. This box plays every audio and format under the sun flawlessly, full Dolby Vision support in MKV including P7 FEL, and besides the OPPO it is the definitive way to experience Dolby Vision content. The VS10 engine and industry standard Realtek SOC are a force to be reckoned with. None of the horrific red push that the Shield delivers with DV content, and best of all the Zidoo fully supports TV Led DV. The UI and software do leave some things to be desired, especially for those with large libraries and the scraper for the Home Theater app needs drastic improvement, but the Zidoo team is constantly working and improving the product with new beta firmwares out usually every few weeks, plus since the OS is very much open source there are people in the community doing wonderful things with Jellyfin and Emby integration. If you have been looking for the best way to play your media files in the highest fidelity possible without spending thousands on a player, look no further, this little box is a powerhouse. Even if you already own a shield and are serious about local media playback, this is a worthy and in my opinion, necessary addition to your setup. Keep the shield for streaming, but hook the Zidoo up to your NAS or SMB shares and enjoy your media to its fullest potential

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.

I absolutely love this device. I'm using it solely to watch movies that are stored on my QNAP 8-bay server. The unit plays everything smoothly so far, even Gemini Man in Dolby Vision at 60fps, no problem. I don't compress my movies and rip them straight from the 4K disc before i transfer them to my server, and these movies are playing flawlessly at 90 +/- Mbps.I strongly advise that you do not try to play ISO files, which seem to be sluggish and stutter terribly. If you use DVDFab, you can select Copy Movie and then select Main Movie to retain dynamic HDR formats, such as HDR10+ and Dolby Vision.As far as audio, this device recognizes and plays DTS-X and Dolby Atmos without an issue. Be sure not to set an EDID, as it may disable DTS-X from your unit.My only gripe is that the unit has no logo for LPCM, but has logos for Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, etc. I have a good number of movies on blu-ray where the best audio track (uncompressed) is in LPCM, so I'm not sure why there is no logo for this. If you're like me, you may want to tag your movie file names to have more accurate information about the specs on screen.Lastly, out of the 215 or so movies I have on my server so far, this unit only had trouble recognizing one. That was Seven Commandments of Kung Fu. It's not an entirely popular movie, but I was still able to add my own custom movie cover and background. It actually did have the plot to the movie and the actors listed for it, too. If it matches to the wrong movie, you can easily correct it 99% of the time with no trouble.