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2024-03-20, 12:35
(This post was last modified: 2024-03-20, 15:38 by banggun. Edited 4 times in total.)
Haha silly I completely ignored these buttons, they actually worked out of the box. Still muscle memory has me reaching for the "normal" volume buttons. In this sense the Zidoo makes a bit more sense but no big deal. Gotta say I am impressed with the performance in Kodi and have tested this now with PlexKodiConnect on the Dune it works perfectly. So in a sense Plex works with this device much better even then ZDMC I say which feels way more hacky mostly because the only way playback works well is when using the native player. The dune is snappy even with more demanding skins like Arctic Horizon though it sometimes slows down a little bit but then again I've seen this happen even on a more beefy PC, so not bad at all. As an Android device running Kodi so far I think this is the best experience. The only thing it struggles with is that if you use the automatic refresh rate option on the Dune itself it completely ignores any setting you have set in Kodi. That means that after you finish video playback the Kodi UI stays at the video refresh rate (e.g. 24/30Hz). This can be resolved by either exiting Kodi and or disabling these options. However it seems even if you disable the setting in Dune entirely it still doesn't seem to work well on Kodi as it doesn't seem to match the refresh rate when using Kodi's built in settings it seems the Dune somehow overrules whatever you set in Kodi. Not a big deal I guess if you have a TV that handles judder well but could be a warning to those that like to use this option.
I even had some pretty good results with Plex actually (even on pretty high bitrate files) but weirdly it seems to struggle after playing a few consecutive play backs and starts to get very slow on video seeking and crash.
A few points that I'm not too fond of with Dune HD:
- A strange bug that on occasion the whole device seems to lose connection on Wired Ethernet. This sometimes lasts for a few minutes and then all seems fine again. Luckily this never happens when playing video but only when navigating the device (it may perhaps be related to the indexing of media)
- Not much in the sense of a community or documentation for the Dune. It is more of a enthusiast device for sure the website itself also feels more like a text document rather then a professional company website
- It's interface. Though I have to say from a technical point of view it is very polished and actually very pleasing to use but the look itself looks like a early 2000 device and feels very dated, if you don't care about that or just like the look then you're fine.
- No web interface to control the Dune HD itself (yes there is an API) but as far as I can tell not even a open source project that helps you with this (this is better handled on Zidoo). Mostly I liked to use the web interface for text input. Of course you can also just bluetooth connect a keyboard.
- Android 11 meaning 1080P will be a limitation for most UI environments. Then again Android 12 still seems very rare on these type of players. Also weirdly sometimes when exiting programs it takes me to the Android TV interface rather then the Dune HD app not sure why this happens.
- The lack of server based media indexing. If you don't use Kodi, Emby, Plex or Jellyfin the device has good options to change metadata but regardless of that I would always prefer doing this on a computer rather then through a TV interface it just takes a lot longer to work through big batches of media. If you are however great at managing and organising your content in tight neat directories it might work well for you. For those that like to watch anime however you will know that the are going to be exceptions no matter how nicely you index your files.
I would like to point out that thing that bugs me the most is that ethernet sometimes craps out for no reason. This is always fixed by a reboot but it seems weird. The other points are minor issues that I'm more or less ok with at this point
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In order to get Dolby Vision, I had to use the developers builds kodi-20240317-172230e9-master-armeabi-v7a.apk.
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Hmm I don't think that's the case as of RC1 anymore it plays Dolby Vision files just fine for me.
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2024-03-21, 11:51
(This post was last modified: 2024-03-21, 11:53 by banggun. Edited 1 time in total.)
Apologies I didn't realise the link I posted didn't deep link to the "pre release" page on the Kodi website must be because of the tab based option but yeah I'm using that one Omega (RC). Hopefully it didn't mess up things too bad. I will say that the ability for using Kodi (with it's in built player) gives the Dune so much more flexibility over the Z9X pro. Almost makes me want to set Kodi as the default application to launch when starting the Dune. I've loaded quite a few add-ons so far including the YouTube add-on that some skins use to play back trailers and have yet to see Kodi crash. It does seem to fall back to Android TV interface everytime I turn off the Dune but it doesn't seem to exit Kodi cause when I relaunch it it takes me right back to where I left off so it's remarkably stable.
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2024-03-22, 21:34
(This post was last modified: 2024-03-22, 21:34 by banggun.)
Thanks for testing this it had my recheck my current setup and I found that the culprit is my AVR being directly connected to the Dune so that Kodi can't properly detect whether my TV is DV capable. I'm guessing since Dune itself has options for you to manually configure this in their software anyway it doesn't work like that so it's mostly an issue I think for people using Kodi and having their AVR directly connected to it.
