Zidoo Hi-Fi 4K UHD Media Player UHD5000

Best product for the money – I bought this product on 3 days ago and so far it is fantastic, I am really impressed. I have quite high end audio gear , however I enjoy watching older video music clips as well as movies. It is difficult to find a player or streamer which can play both videos and music well; for its price , this is a fantastic piece of hardware. The remote and UI are excellent, way better than my HiFi Rose RS250 that I have (which plays excellent hifi audio, but stutters even with low resolution video).

Waste of money! – I posted this review on the Selby Acoustics product page because that's where I purchased it from, but of course, they don't publish bad reviews because they want to sell their stock. In a nutshell, this product should have never been put on sale because of the various bugs it has. I purchased it because of the raving reviews its predecessor the UHD3000 had and boy was I in for a shock.

My movie collection of 1200+ movies which consist of Bluray/UHD disks that I own and ripped using a Zapitti NAS, would just randomly crash the unit when used with the internal storage bays. The same movies in the same drives would work perfectly fine with my 3 year old Zapitti 4K. Selby wasn't very helpful in trying to resolve it so I took it back home and started working with Zidoo directly.

What's happening now is, Zidoo is using paying customers like myself as guinea pigs for their R&D. If you think I'm joking, check Zidoo's own support blog which is filled with customers who are having the same issues as myself:

http://forum.zidoo.tv/index.php?threads/beta-version-v1-0-52-for-z9x-pro-z20-pro-z2000-pro-z2600-uhd5000-release.96146/

http://forum.zidoo.tv/index.php?threads/beta-version-v1-0-75-for-z9x-pro-z20-pro-z2000-pro-z2600-uhd5000-release.97500/page-18

http://forum.zidoo.tv/index.php?threads/beta-version-v1-0-86-for-z9x-pro-z20-pro-z2000-pro-z2600-uhd5000-release.98279/page-7

http://forum.zidoo.tv/index.php?threads/occasional-jerky-choppy-playback.97341/page-11

I only got the Zidoo because my Zapitti was no longer getting support from the manufacturer and I thought the Zidoo would work the same. I can't believe how wrong I was. Very disappointed with the UHD5000 ownership experience.

Do yourselves a favour if you intend to buy one of these, and keep an eye out in the above links to see at what level of functionality their products, are before you part with your hard earned money.

Edit: 22.04.2024

Righto, so there has been an interesting development for myself. I was running out of space in my internal drives which are 16TB each. For the record, any drives larger than 16tb has issues so the maximum recommended single drive for the Zidoo is 16tb. Because of this, I cooked up a Synology NAS. Now the player does not crash at all. Dolby Vision, HDR HDR10+ content all work fine. The only issue for me at the moment is micro stutter. For an example, after a fast moving scene, if the next scene is a slow moving/panning scene, there's about 3 seconds of micro stutter before playback is smooth again.

Going back to the playback issue that was resolved after moving the my content to a NAS. This sort of indicates that the internal drive controller may have issues. Those who intend to keep their content in the internal drive bays should keep this in mind. I have not tested using USB attached storage.

Edit 3rd of September 2024 Ok, so I currently have zero issues with the Zidoo UHD5000 as long as the source of the media is a NAS. If the movies are sourced from its internal bays, I get the random crashes that I mentioned about. I thought of increasing the star rating I gave this player as I no longer have issues, but I will not for the following reasons. 1. The aforementioned crashes still exist with this player when internal drives are used. Maybe it's isolated to my device, but the store I bought it from (Selby Acoustics) was unhelpful as they do not test with movies on internal drive bays. They test with their own NAS and this player works fine with a NAS. 2. Not everyone can afford a NAS and the player should perform as advertised regardless of how your media is stored electronically, be it, internal drives, USB attached drive or Network attached storage. And my player fails to perform its advertised capabilities when used with internal drives, which I presume most users will use.