Kodi

Since we released 19.0 "Matrix", we've been hearing a lot of noise about how people's addons have stopped working, and why we're all Really Bad People for doing this. We thought it would be worth helping people understand what's happening here - mostly, because our fingers are getting tired from trying to explain, and it'll save an awful lot of typing in the forum, or on Facebook, or wherever. Please remember, first of all, that Kodi itself does not automatically update. We might tell you that a new version is available, sure, but we never force a new version onto you: that's entirely a product of your chosen operating system and configuration. It's probably enabled by d…

In 2015, Kodi’s default theme Confluence was growing long in the tooth. Most of the really exciting skins from that time accomplished far more, and Confluence was ultimately a 2009 update to an existing skin called MediaStream that was itself several years old. It was time for Confluence to retire. We needed something new that adhered to the UX best practices of the time. I proposed some wireframes based on Google’s Material Design that were pretty vague, but I hoped would be enough to get us started. Almost immediately, members of our team of skilled skinners (Phil65 and Piers) jumped on the task. I made my initial suggestion early on the 17th of June, and Piers had…

Hello - okay - new teeth, that’s weird. So, where was I? Oh, that’s right... Barcelona! Well, we did it. After a couple of years of pandemic-induced isolation, we managed to get most of the team together in early April for the first time in forever. We successfully brought people in from as far afield as western Canada and Australia, from Europe and from India, for a few days of brainstorming, hacking, direction-setting, updates and, yes, beer. Without straying into politics, we had notable absences, of course, from our Russian and Ukrainian team members. Stay safe, guys: you were genuinely missed. As a break from our normal day-by-day account, this year we're writing t…

Welcome, everyone, to Kodi Devcon 2023, coming to you this year from halfway up an Italian mountain overlooking Lake Iseo. We're full of coffee, it's seven degrees outside, we don't have enough power outlets, and we're struggling to stream over dubious Internet connectivity (courtesy of Mr Musk). What could be better? A slightly different format this year: we want to use the time together as productively as we can, so there'll be less discussion and more collaboration than previously. So, let's go... Finance We kicked off the day with an overview on our financial position: income, reserves, commitments, sponsorships. We're doing okay, but the combination of Covid and t…

The lights are dimmed, the projector is running, the microphones are tested, the coffee is on... yes, it's time for Kodi's DevCon once again! We're coming to you from beautiful Budapest, the grand capital of Hungary - which last hosted us eight years ago, and it's genuinely great to be back. With two thousand years of history, stretching from Celtic origins by way of Romans and Mongols and the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, modern Budapest is today a global city with vibrant finance, media, fashion, technology, and entertainment sectors. If you know nothing about Hungary, I promise you that you've seen this city and the surrounding countryside in more films and tel…

Good morning, dear reader (okay, "readers" - I'll be generous, and assume there's more than one of you!). It's a beautiful day, the skies are an endless sea of blue, the forecast is a congenial 20℃ spring day - and we're back in a sealed room, and ready to get going with Day Two of this year's DevCon. First up, romanvm, with a talk on computer text encoding - not necessarily Kodi-specific, but something that affects so many applications, particularly when using non-Latin scripts. Fundamentally, all text is abstract, and we simply need an agreed way to represent some symbols in a binary form so they can be stored, manipulated, and retrieved as needed - from 7-bit ASCII to…

Time flies, and we're already at the third and final day of DevCon 2024. We'll be losing people today as they head home, which will shorten events; additionally, most of the day is scheduled for the inevitable people-sitting-together-and-hacking-code later today, which will also eat into time, so this will inevitably be a short post. Random, spontaneous, unstructured conversations about mirrors, more about release cycles, about merging. A wild conversation about a potential third-party conference in south Asia, and how any of us would physically get there anyway, given that some of our members don't fly for climate reasons (and we can't afford it anyway). Various debates…

Team Flirc and Team Kodi are thrilled to introduce the newly designed Flirc Raspberry Pi 5 Case, Kodi Edition. Available now! Our journey began with a host of ideas that we transformed into a crowdsourcing poll on the Kodi forums. The community chose from six designs, and we loved seeing your preferences and hearing your feedback. We’re excited to continue this collaborative approach because, just as Kodi is community-driven, so should its official case be. With only about 2,000 cases available, this is a truly limited edition. Once sold out, we won’t produce more. Instead, every quarter, we’ll engage with the community again, allowing you to submit and vote on new idea…

As you may have seen on other posts, we're broadly back on line now, with the forum, Wiki and paste sites all operational. It's been a huge effort by several key team members - I won't name names, but you know who you are - and we're all immensely grateful for their work. So, without putting on a hair shirt...in the interests of transparency and minimising the chances of anything like this happening again, we've really had to dig into this to see what we can learn. First of all - what happened? This is probably the most important question, and actually one of the hardest to definitively answer. We've been open about the attack vector being an old administrative accoun…

Hi, everyone! I am Mohd. Shaheer, Computer Science undergrad in freshman year. I am a GSoC contributor working on the project “Finish the web interface” for Kodi. I have been working on this project for the past 3 months. This blog post contains my experience through phase 2 (Final evaluation) of GSoC and an overview of my work during that period. In my previous blog, I wrote about my work up until the mid-evaluation of GSoC. You can find it here. Phase 2 (July 25th — September 5) This phase turned out to be more challenging than the previous one. During this phase, the first functionality I worked on was “Implementing the Video playback” which involved working on the …

October... the month that gave birth to the world's most famous and traditional beer festival. What's possibly better than two weeks of collective beer drinking? Under normal circumstances...probably nothing. In the so called new normal? Let's pretend we can tolerate a bit more of this social awkwardness and find an alternative way: let's just celebrate beer... and open-source. Or in Team Kodi's dictionary: just another month at the office :) For yet another year, Kodi is participating as a project in Hacktoberfest. Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software run by DigitalOcean. During the month of October, individuals are invited to join open-sour…

In the last 24 hours we became aware of a dump of the Kodi user forum (MyBB) software being advertised for sale on internet forums. This post confirms that a breach has taken place. MyBB admin logs show the account of a trusted but currently inactive member of the forum admin team was used to access the web-based MyBB admin console twice: on 16 February and again on 21 February. The account was used to create database backups which were then downloaded and deleted. It also downloaded existing nightly full-backups of the database. The account owner has confirmed they did not access the admin console to perform these actions. The admin team have disabled the account used …

Mutter, mutter... "18.8 will be the last", they said... "all efforts will go into 19.x now", they said... famous last words... Okay, one more roll of the "Leia" die, although this one is really driven by circumstances beyond our control. Technical changes by Cloudflare caused significant issues with HTTP access to any site using them - metadata sources, for example - and we need to put in a quick workaround before everyone gets too upset; while 19.x "Matrix" is close, it's not close enough to leave these issues unaddressed. So, as we're building that new code, we thought that we might as well fix a couple of other regressions while we're here. With no further fanfare, t…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, no matter how much testing you do before a major release, you'll never find and squash anything like all the bugs until you get a proper, large-scale, mass test of the code. In other words, it's time for a bugfix release on the Kodi 19 "Matrix" series, as - thanks to your feedback - we've managed to fix a whole batch of issues over the past few weeks. In no particular order, this version includes fixes for the following: As a bug fix release, don't bother going to look for new features; while there are some, that's not the main purpose of this version. Full details are on GitHub, but here's the short form... Video Fixed: H…

It's been some time since we released 19.1, and numerous issues have revealed themselves and been resolved in the intervening months. As such, we're probably overdue a formal release of the updates, so, without further ado - here's the latest release in the "Matrix" series. As with other point releases, don't go looking for new features, as that isn't really the purpose here. Full details are on GitHub, but here's the short form... PVR Fixed: crash when accessing invalid PVR channel from favourites Fixed: crash on startup while searching for missing channel icons Fixed: crash on startup caused by missing timer type Fixed: "Delete permanently" of recordings from trash …

Okay, we know that we've only just released 19.2, and some of you are probably even still waiting for that, but that's a big part of the reason we need to push out a new build. We still had some challenges with the Xbox release, and some other issues came to light that we didn't want to ignore - so, rather than get into platform-specific point releases, we thought we'd just nudge up to 19.3 and go for it. As with other point releases, don't go looking for new features, as that isn't really the purpose here. Full details are on GitHub, but here's the short form... We've had some challenges getting the Xbox version released because of some specific platform requirements …

Is it too late to say "Happy New Year"? Probably, but this is still the first release of 2022, so let's go with that anyway. It's point release o'clock once more, so, without further fanfare, I give you Kodi "Matrix" 19.4: more bug fixes, some backports, no real new features. Full changelog since 19.3 on Github, as usual. Estuary Fix: Home screen context menu fix for when there are more than 10 items in menu. Fix: Seekbar wouldn't disappear after 5 sec when using remote app e.g. Kore or JSON to pause Kodi. Input Fix: English keyboard missing semi-colon. Fix: Chinese keyboard character now displaying correctly. Music Fix: Artist discography export to NFO. PVR …

Happy Holidays, everyone! To celebrate, here we have release 19.5. This release caps off the v19 Matrix development cycle - we are not intending anything further now until 20.0 "Nexus". Without further fanfare, then I give you Kodi "Matrix" 19.5: more bug fixes, some backports, no real new features. Full changelog since 19.4 on Github, as usual. Thanks, as always, to everyone who has helped us track down and fix any issues. As this is a point release, there are no major changes since the previous version, and you should be fine to install this straight over the top of any existing Kodi 19.x installation - indeed, this will happen automatically on many platforms. Howeve…

So, here we go, with no further ado, we'd like to present the first Alpha releases of Kodi 20.x "Nexus". This is a major release, so, as you'd expect, it comes with many new features. However, it will inevitably cause problems for some people, which is why we'll go through a more traditional Alpha/Beta/Release Candidate model. As such, then, please be aware that installing this will inevitably break things, and we'd really like your help at that point to identify the problems and get them fixed. So, all that aside... what's actually changed? Video AV1 hardware decoding for Android. PR AV1 hardware decoding for Linux via VAAPI PR Bump to FFMPEG 4.4 PR Subtitles Add…

Slightly delayed Alpha 2, but here we go. We had a bit of a wild ride more due to behind the scenes update and changes - however, the good news is that it's given us more time for fixes and additions. Release notes Platform Specific Android Fix a stutter when the Kodi Android app was opened, closed and opened again. One of our team members (@thexai) noticed an issue with a recent PR that caused media stuttering to occur only after the app was opened and closed and reopened again without a force close. @ksooo has come up with a fix, so hopefully playback should be a better experience over Alpha 1. Another TrueHD fix - buffers reduced to a specific level to optimise d…

Time for another Alpha release for the upcoming Version 20 "Nexus" release of Kodi. As always, thanks go out to all contributors for their work - not only those in Team Kodi, but also to all the third party users that choose to roll up their sleeves and fix an issue. Everyone appreciates you for making Kodi better! Release notes Addons Some crashes in addon installation and repository checks have been corrected (ksooo, howie-f) AlwinEsch has implemented a large feature to allow multiple instances of the same binary addon. This allows, for example, two instances of a PVR addon (e.g. PVR.HTS) to run using different backend provider instances. The usage of this will…

Here we go folks: ramping things up, so we now have the first Beta for Kodi v20, "Nexus". As always, thanks go out to all contributors for their work. We are nearing 4,000 commits since v19 "Matrix" was first released on February 19th 2021. For everyone that has contributed, both those in Team Kodi, and all other developers that choose to roll up their sleeves and fix an issue - thank you. Everyone appreciates you for making Kodi better. We also want to thank all those users who provide endless support on the forums, we appreciate you, and all the support anyone provides to our users. Release notes Addons Assorted binary addon fixes/updates - imagedecoder, screensav…

This release is so fresh that we don't yet even have an image... oops! It's been a hectic last couple of months in the world of Kodi, but the wheels keep on turning. Without any further ado, we are happy to announce the first Alpha release for Kodi 21.x "Omega". This is a major release, so, as you'd expect, it comes with many new features. However, with a core change to FFmpeg 6.0, there is a very good chance that some regressions may occur. As such, please be aware that installing this will most likely break things, and we'd really like your help at that point to identify the problems and get them fixed. Please raise Github issues with full debug logs to help us resolv…

Time for the next milestone release for Kodi 21 "Omega". This is our second Alpha release for this cycle. This is a major release, so, as you'd expect, it comes with many new features. However, with a core change to FFmpeg 6.0, there is a very good chance that some regressions may occur. As such, please be aware that installing this will most likely break things, and we'd really like your help at that point to identify the problems and get them fixed. Please raise Github issues with full debug logs to help us resolve any issues you wonderful testers come across. Over the last couple of months we've merged 120 pull requests - fixing issues, adding features, and improvin…

Time for the next milestone release for Kodi 21 "Omega". Slightly delayed this time around compared to what we were striving for, however we are happy to announce the arrival of Alpha 3. This is a major release, so, as you'd expect, it comes with many new features. However, with a core change to FFmpeg 6.0, there is a very good chance that some regressions may occur. As such, please be aware that installing this will most likely break things, and we'd really like your help at that point to identify the problems and get them fixed. Please raise Github issues with full debug logs to help us resolve any issues you wonderful testers come across. A further 176 Pull Requests …