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

To preface, I own 2x Nvidia Shield Pros, and I like them both for Plex, but this Zidoo Z9X Pro blows them away in terms of picture quality. That said you have to know what you're buying. A lot of the 1-star reviews here aren't really using this device in its intended purpose, and complaining it doesn't live up to it. First and foremost this device prioritizes local playing, whether from an attached HD or a SMB network location, and does so *extremely well*. The picture quality this device is capable of through the VS10 dolby vision chip is incredible, on par with $500+ UHD disk players. This device is NOT prioritizing Hulu or Netflix, although you can get both to work, I would opt for an Apple TV or Shield Pro if that's your goal. The Z9X Pro has a VS10 chip, which means it plays Dolby Vision remuxes from 4K UHD disks flawlessly, including DV profile 7 FEL. With some add-ons, it's also of playing local media via Plex, which adds a whole new dimension. If you have a folder full of MKVs ripped from your UHD disk collection, this will playback that content at reference quality. Seriously it'll blow you away. The VS10 chip is that good. While you can get streaming apps via the Google Play store or through Kodi add-ons. The main goal of this device is achieve amazing quality in local playback. Keep that in mind and you won't be disappointed.

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.

Using Google Play can work but turn of the play protect and you'll get to use whatever app you've side loaded. Great Box. This is my fourth Zidoo. Have one in every room. All interconnected to a main HDD. Could use a bit better file manager and the app ones you have to buy isn't a good option (Please Zidoo work on a better file manager). I don't like that option of having to buy a better file manager. The remote could use a little work too. Sometimes it is glitchy. The back light doesn't work well at all. But, having said all that, I have the amazon stick the Nvidia and others. I would buy this again. I also wish that when android upgrades higher (Now Android 11) that the apps stay up with all the changes. Seems to always make my apps that worked great not so much. And takes some work on my side and begging the app providers to work on updates to their apps. But again, I like it.

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.

I bought this for the sole purpose of playing full size ISO files from UHD and 3D Blu Ray discs. I've directly connected a hard drive via a SATA cable and via USB 3. I've also tried SSD and standard HDD and both were quick and played files flawlessly. The Home Theater 4.0 app organizes my library beautifully. It automatically recognizes and plays ISOs and lets you choose the Blu Ray Menu experience or you can go right to playing the movie. The picture and sound quality are amazing. Much better than my Apple TV using Plex. The 3D pops more than my 3D blu ray player. Thats actually why I decided to rip my entire blu ray collection. I want all of them to look this good. There are some pretty harsh reviews for this product but at least in my case I couldn't be happier with it.

As a video player, it seems pretty good. I didn't exhaustively test it for this and never ran into the video stuttering that some people have complained of. I compare it to my now-orphaned Zappiti Neo at 3x the price and it has a couple of features the Zappiti lacks, such as true fast forward/rewind and next/previous chapter. The "video wall" user interface is... nice. Not great, but that's only because I'm spoiled by the superior and far more flexible Zappiti (now R_volution) "video wall" UI. Given the size of my video collection, I really need the better Zappiti UI. I primarily bought it as a music player though as my Zappiti cannot play DSD64 audio files without inserting short, silent gaps between them. For live albums and concert albums, that drives me nuts. The Zidoo can play all audio files it supports in a true, "gapless" manner. However, despite claiming to do so properly, the player simply cannot handle multi-channel DSD64 files (or multi-channel SACD ISO files for that matter) without frequent "stuttering". According to the Zidoo forum, this is a known issue despite them being able to do this on older hardware with older software. One step forward, two steps back. I'll be monitoring the Zidoo forum to see if this ever actually gets fixed and will probably buy another one if it does. I just won't bother using it for a video player.

After deciding to replace my ODroid media player, I spent months and months researching what could handle what, and finally landed on the Zidoo Z9X Pro. This monster spent months out of stock, and so when I did finally device this was the was I was going to go, I spent at least three months watching Amazon's page to see if it ever came back in. It did, I bought it, and I must say, I'm very impressed. This AndroidTV-based media player has so far taken everything I can throw at it, including handling Dolby Vision, which was a big selling point with me, as was being able to play a full disc backup with Java menu support - if I design a bluray menu in Java, and export it, I can now test it real-world, instead of just seeing how it looks in the authoring software. Yes! Yes! Yes! Network support, wifi support, Dolby Vision support, external drive support.. This little device has it all in a very well produced metal enclosure that never gets too warm to the touch. The manufacturing feels very solid, very crisp, and very clean: never once would I even think of refering to this as "the Temu version of a media player." My only gripe, assuming I had one, would be that the menus aren't exactly customizable. No theme support, no ability to remove the stuff I don't use. But, considering what I'm getting in this fine $200ish package, I'm pretty okay with it. We use this as the daily driver for all media in the house, watching everything from TV shows to 4K movies on it, and haven't had a glitch anywhere. Highly recommended.

I downgraded to 4 stars for a couple minor reasons. Reason one is the instructions in the box is a complete waste of paper. Luckily the forums and youtube videos are a great help. Second is the firmware shipped and still the official one is not ready for primetime. Again the forums to the rescue to get the beta firmware that resolves those issues. I came from a Zappiti Neo since Zappiti went out of business. Navigating and browsing files is so so so much faster. Identification and grouping does a better job. Identification is faster. Dolby Vision is handled better. Additional bonus is it has a music player that does similar for your music collection. Something the Neo never had. Price is considerable less than I paid for the Neo. Overall I am very happy.