- Power On The Player/Tests

Ziddo has designed its own GUI for its players, called called ZIUI. Though we have seen its basic layout and features in previous reviews, it maintains a good overall usability and easy access to the player's features, allows you to manage applications, files, set the parental lock, and more.

The player is based on the the Android 4.4.4. Interestingly, ZIUI GUI renders at 1280x720 in order to be more responsive but of course, the player outputs at the desired resolution (4K).

Below you see the Explorer app, from which you can quickly access local and network files.

The player arrived with 1.0.5 firmware, which later upgraded to the latest 1.0.7 via the USB OTA function. It comes with no Root functionality, but this s can be added later.

The Sound Device Manager app includes settings related to the audio output, and from here you can set the HDMI Audio passthrough option..

The Video options app le's you set the preferred video resolution through HDMI - up to 4096x2160 @ 24Hz.

You have also the option to scale your screen if needed:

Following the first boot, the available empty space was around 5.5GB.

Before starting out tests, let's see the information provided by the CPU-Z utility. The software reported that the player has the RK3066 inside, although it is actually the RK3229:

We tested the player in using the following set up:

• TV: Panasonic 55CMX710E (4K +3D capable)
• A/V Receiver: Yamaha RX-V775 (7.2 capable) with the latest firmware installed
• Wifi Router: TP-Link VR200 (802ac,b,g,n) with the latest firmware installed

For testing the device we used audio/video files from KODI Wiki

HD Audio Tests (Audio Output set to HDMI Passthrough)

The Zidoo X1 II can output Dolby and DTS 7.1-channel audio, but the audio playback was problematic with many annoying pauses.

The ZDMC also supports up to 7.1 passthrough playback. In case you decide to use the AAC format, have in mind that the player will downsample 5.1 and 7.1 audio to stereo (2.0).

Video Bitrate Tests

We used H.264 and H.265/HEVC encoded .mkv video clips (up to 400Mbps bitrate) in order to test the local/network streaming and playback performance of the player.

While the players's performance with the USB flash drive plugged in was perfect, using the LAN limits the playable files to those up to 70Mbps. Using Wifi will allow you to play just up to 30Mbps encoded files. The issue here is obviously the lack of support for 1Gbit LAN and Wifi 802ac.

4K Tests x264 (AVC)

For sure, the player's ability to playback up to 200Mbps files (from USB) gives it an edge compared with other products. The build-in player will generally playback most currently available digital files. Ideally, we would like to see a performance equal to what we experienced with the Zidoo X6 Pro player, and offer proper Greek Subtitle support from the stock video player.

4K Tests x265 (HEVC)

With the firmware 1.0.7 installed, the Zidoo X1 II player playbacked 8bit and 10bit H.265 (HEVC) files correctly. Some test files were more difficult to play but there should be no issues with most commercially available files. Again high-bitrate files with AC3 sound may cause sound skipping.

Build-in video player subtitles

While the ZDMC (KODI) offers perfect subtitle support, the built-in video player needs some further fine-tuning. It provide some option for setting up subtitles, but actually it doesn't fully supports non-english encodings. In order to get them displayed perfectly, you should use the UTF SRT sub encoding.

ZDMC (KODI)

Zidoo offers their own version of KODI named ZDMC. Below you see version 16.0, which was compiled in the 2nd of Mar 2016:

After several hours of playback, we noticed that the memory tends to get full - from the initially available 564MB, the player drops to 259MB, resulting in some sound skipping:

The ZDMC offers all the available options for HD audio passhtrough: