Appreciate your help, but did not work... my Q5 4K unit has slightly different internals than pic you posted above. No thermal pads, heatsink looks little different, plus a couple of other minor differences. Must be an older (or different) hardware revision. This is why HiMedia and other Chinese companies suck big time... not only is there a Q5, a Q5 II and a Q5 4K (also referred to as Q5 III or IV), but at least two different Q5 4K variants!!! Talk about confusing customers, forcing them to rely on forums like this to fend for themselves (with no official support), and with APK's and ZIP's littered on different sites to get the player to even work as advertised! HiMedia may just have a good player in whatever variant of Q5, but I'm already pissed at this company!
So, with the hardware version I have, the wrapper APK refuses to install no matter what I try, and manually adding the playercorefactory.xml file to Kodi does nothing. It breaks playback altogether, where neither Kodi's player nor the HiMedia player launched. Why? Because the XML references
com.himedia.xbmcwrapper, which failed to install in the first place. The Dolby Atmos patch won't install either, probably due to hardware revision issue as well.
I had mistakenly double-ordered this player (2 different China sources, iandroidtvbox.com and niking-niking (ebay)). Should have the one from that ebay source next week. I'm already fretting what hardware revision it will turn out to be... this must be what it's like to play Russian Roulette lite. Maybe the only way ensure getting the proper Q5 version is Futeko via UK.
Update: About to toss in the towel on the Q5 unit I have, I stumbled upon a different himediaWrapper.apk on a Chinese forum. Had to used Google Translate. Figured why not and tried it, and it worked! HiMedia player now launches when playing videos from Kodi! The Dolby ATMOS patch is still a no-go, but this isn't a dealbreaker for me.
BTW, there are 3 different versions of the himediaWrapper APK. The version that worked for me is himediaWrapper_user.apk. Found it here.
Anyway, I can finally begin testing... will report back tomorrow!