To get the PreShow Experience to work properly on your Zidoo Media Player running ZDMC, you'll need to follow these directions.
Go into your Kodi system settings and select "System information." Take note of your IP address. Then go back to the system settings and select "Services."
Then select the "Control" and turn on "Allow remote control via HTTP." You'll need to enter a password. Take note of your username and password.
You'll then want to download the ZDMC Zidoo Video Player Action Files at the link below:
Open both files in a text editor and change <username>, <password> and <ip-address> to the values that you noted earlier in this guide.
# This action file disables the Zidoo External Video Player in Kodi # The action file should be launched prior to any videos in your sequence. # "Allow remote control via HTTP" must be enabled for the file to work. # Replace <username>, <password>, and <ip-adrdess> with the appropriate information from you system # For more information on how to set up remote control via HTTP, go to https://kodi.wiki/view/Settings/Services/Control http://<username>:<password>@<ip-address>:8080/jsonrpc {"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Settings.SetSettingValue", "params": {"setting": "videoplayer.enableexternalplayer", "value": false}, "id": 1}
Move the files to the Action folder in your PreShow Experience folder.
Now go into PreShow Experience in Kodi and edit a sequence. You'll want to add an action file to the beginning of your PreShow.
Once you have added the action, edit it to select Zidoo-DisablePlayer.pseaction from where you just moved it in the action folder of your PreShow content. This turns off Zidoo's external player so that Kodi will use the internal player that works properly with PreShow.
You'll follow the same process to add the second action file to your sequence prior to the feature. Edit this one to select Zidoo-EnablePlayer.pseaction.
Then edit your "Features" and change Rating Bumper to Image.
Whenever the Zidoo External video player gets to the end of a file it ends the sequence. With this method you are only able to play the final video your sequence using the Zidoo external player.
Hopefully this will work for most use cases. Trivia and trailers don't use the Zidoo player, so they aren't affected. It is just bumpers and features. The obvious downside is that you can't play multiple features or watch an animated ratings bumper.
I will revisit this if/when the PreShow playlist process is updated.