How to Correct Unmatched Movies in Zidoo Z9X: A Complete Guide

The Zidoo Z9X is a powerful Android-based media player that uses its built-in Home Theater app to automatically scrape metadata — titles, posters, descriptions, and ratings — for your movie library. When the scraper can't confidently identify a file, it marks it as unmatched, leaving your library with missing artwork and no playback metadata. Fixing this is straightforward once you understand how the matching system works.

Why Movies Go Unmatched in the First Place

The Z9X's Home Theater app queries online databases (primarily TheMovieDB and TheTVDB) based on your file's name. When there's a mismatch between what's in the filename and what's in the database, the scraper either assigns the wrong match or gives up entirely.

Common causes include:

• Non-standard file naming — files named things like movie_final_v2_BLURAY.mkv confuse the parser
• Obscure or foreign-language titles — smaller database coverage means fewer results
• Multiple versions of the same title — remakes or sequels with nearly identical names create ambiguity
• Year missing from the filename — the year is a critical disambiguation signal
• Special characters or abbreviations in filenames that don't match database entries

Understanding the root cause helps you choose the right correction method.

Method 1: Manual Matching Through the Z9X Interface 🎬

This is the most direct fix and works without touching your actual files.

1. Open the Home Theater app on your Z9X
2. Navigate to your movie library and locate the unmatched file (it typically shows a generic placeholder poster)
3. Long-press on the title to open the context menu
4. Select "Identify" or "Match" (the label varies slightly by firmware version)
5. A search dialog will appear — enter the correct movie title manually
6. Browse the returned results and select the correct entry
7. Confirm the match

The scraper will then pull down all associated metadata, poster art, backdrop images, and plot information from the database. This process does not alter your source file — it only updates the local metadata database the Home Theater app maintains.

Method 2: Rename Your Files to Match Database Conventions

If you have a large number of unmatched files, bulk renaming is a more scalable approach. The Z9X scraper responds best to filenames structured as:

For example:

• The Godfather (1972).mkv ✅
• godfather_1972_BD_remux.mkv ❌

Key naming rules that improve match rates:

After renaming, trigger a library rescan in the Home Theater settings to re-run the scraper against your updated filenames.

Method 3: Use the ZDMC App for More Control

Zidoo also ships with ZDMC, its customized fork of Kodi. If the native Home Theater app repeatedly fails on certain files, ZDMC uses the Kodi scraper engine, which has its own matching logic and broader community-maintained database integrations.

You can match a film in ZDMC by right-clicking a library entry and selecting "Scan item to library" after correcting its filename, or use the built-in "Information" panel to manually override the match with a direct TMDB or IMDb ID — a method useful for highly obscure titles where name searches return noise.

Method 4: Force a Full Library Rescan

Sometimes unmatched files were simply skipped during an incomplete initial scan. Before doing anything else, it's worth running a forced rescan:

1. Go to Settings → Home Theater → Media Center Settings
2. Select your library source
3. Choose "Scan Library" or "Refresh"
4. Wait for the process to complete fully before checking results

This passive method resolves cases where network interruptions or database rate-limiting during the first scan caused files to go unmatched without a naming issue being the real culprit.

Method 5: Correct Matches That Were Made Incorrectly

An unmatched movie is visible. A wrongly matched movie is trickier — the metadata looks correct but belongs to the wrong film. The fix is the same long-press → "Identify" workflow, but this time you're correcting an existing association rather than filling a blank.

It helps to search by TMDB ID if title searches return the wrong result repeatedly. You can find a film's TMDB ID directly at themoviedb.org and enter it in the Z9X search field as a numeric lookup — this bypasses string-matching ambiguity entirely.

The Variables That Affect Your Experience

How well the Z9X scraper performs across a library depends on factors that differ from one user to the next:

• Library size — thousands of files amplify naming inconsistency problems
• Source of rips — files ripped from discs often retain scene-group naming conventions that aren't scraper-friendly
• Network stability — the scraper is database-dependent; slow or interrupted connections cause incomplete scans
• Firmware version — Zidoo periodically updates matching logic, so older firmware may behave differently than current releases
• Mix of languages — non-English libraries often require more manual intervention due to database coverage gaps

A user with a well-named 200-film library on a stable connection will have a very different experience than someone with 2,000 files sourced from multiple origins over years of accumulation. The tools are the same — but how much manual correction is realistic depends entirely on what your library actually looks like.