First impressions and suggestions after a week of use (new setup).
- Setup: Zappiti Neo with Sony 7.2.1 Atmos/DTS:X Receiver with 1080p Sony SDR ceiling mount projection TV; media hosted on 24TB QNAP NAS.
- Old Media Player (baseline): AppleTV 4K with Infuse Pro.
- PROS: Zappiti plays anything; direct pass-thru of audio to receiver; tested TrueHD7.1 with Atmos and DTS:X sound streams perfectly!; receiver will recognize and 'upscale' the sound stream automatically to reflect speaker config; Zappiti video GUI works ok but has some pros/cons compared to Infuse; nice to have Zappiti on Win11 as alternative UI to manage media collection and identification. Love the lighted remote (makes it easier when fumbling in the dark).
- CONS/BUGS: Zappiti Neo seems to "hang" during initial scan...it searches and finds ~2500 movies then hangs for hours....I'm using Zappiti on Win11 in order to complete the initial scan of media; transferring media to Zappiti internal HDD seems slow (max 5-8MB/sec) despite plenty of WiFi/LAN head room; identifying and populating media metadata takes a very long time.

SUGGESTIONS:
- Provide app or function to test LAN/NAS transfer speed (Infuse has this function); useful to debug slow transfer speed.
- Show actual LAN/WiFI transfer speed when displaying media info.
- Provide a list of keywords that can be used in filenames when auto-populating banners (eg; UHD, directors cut, etc).
- Provide option to display media information as option that can be applied to whole collection (vs. enabling one media file at a time).
- Provide more flexibility in handling of year within the media filename. I had to bulk rename >3000 files to place the year in (brackets) in order for Zappiti to auto-identify the files.
- Provide mechanism (and documentation) to manually populate meta-data locally from file (eg: similar to XML file that inFuse recognizes).
- Provide ability to persist preferred sort order within a specific category (eg: show Action in descending date order).
- Provide ability stack filters (eg: unseen science fiction movies from 2020-present).
- Zappiti doesn't seem to control audio volume +/- or switch receiver on/off via HDMI-CEC? Still trying to figure this problem out.
- Provide pictures or thumbnails of actors (vs. just names); provide ability to drill-down on an actor to see what other movies/TV they appear in.

Love the Zappiti media player! It unleashes the full potential of modern theatre receivers and processes HDR to SDR really well.