Kodi

So... drum roll...hot on the heels of 19.x "Matrix" Alpha 2, and after a quick detour for an unexpected 18.9 "Leia" release, we bring you the stunningly-named 19.x "Matrix" Alpha 3. This will hopefully be the last of our alpha releases, before we move into beta and onto formal release (but no promises, obviously). Usual caveats: while we're approaching beta, this is still an alpha, and some things will be broken. That is, basically, the whole point of releasing it, after all: find the problems, and fix them before final release. Here's a non-exhaustive list of the major feature changes since the last release, although there have also been many more improvements and "beh…

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…

Hello Kodi community. This is Scott, the founder of TheTVDB. There has been some confusion related to the availability of our API and the various Kodi scrapers for TheTVDB. Hopefully I can provide some clarity. TheTVDB was originally written in a weekend in 2004, with features and data slowly expanding with varying degrees of thoughtfulness. Inevitably, some mistakes were made and the industry has changed considerably in the years since. Through a complete restructuring of data a few years ago, we attempted to not only correct past mistakes, but also become more flexible in how we accommodate edge cases and non-traditional series. This rewrite forced us to create a new …

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…

As is always inevitable in software, we are back with a new release of Kodi 20.x "Nexus". An assortment of bug fixes, some backports, no real new features. Full changelog since 20.0 on Github, as usual. Release notes Audio @fritsch has been working feverishly on Android-related audio issues over the past couple of months, and in combination with @thexai has introduced an algorithm to look to overcome some audio issues particularly aimed at Android devices. A summary is: Algorithm runs for 30 seconds to learn what is going on: during this time no corrections are done, but the internal m_disconAdjustTimeMs is updated to a new value whenever when the sync error is foun…

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…

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 …

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…

Editorial note: this blog post has been delayed for technical reasons, so the release is already available. Time marches on for Kodi 21 "Omega", we are here with the third Beta release! 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. First, we'd like to make a …

It's Time! We are pleased to present the latest release of Kodi, v20 "Nexus". With over 4,600 commits since v19 "Matrix" was released on February 19th, 2021, this has been a huge effort. Thanks go out to our team members, and everyone in our community who sent a pull request, tested and gave feedback, or provided support to users on the forum. We appreciate your contribution to making Kodi better. Let's review some of the changes you can expect: Major Features Multiple Instances of Binary Add-ons This allows Kodi to load multiple instances of a binary add-on. For example: TVHeadend users can now run more than one instance of the add-on to connect to multiple back-end T…

Nexus just won't end, it seems: we're back already, this time what we hope will be the final release for the Nexus line. Welcome to 20.5! An assortment of bug fixes, some backports, no real new features. Full changelog since 20.4 on Github, as usual. Release notes Input Reverted a number of controller changes that caused massive failures on Android devices. Input handling will now be the same as what was available in 20.3. Platform Specific Android Some great detective work was done by @spdfrk for a fix that meant Kodi would close the app during potential colour mode changes. A backport by @fritsch that intends to bring Nexus inline with Omega behaviour for Audi…

So, a slightly different topic for a change. We talk a lot about the Kodi software, its development and releases, and that's fine, as that's what we're all about and that's what everyone ultimately sees. However, we thought we'd change the subject a little and explore what goes on behind the scenes: how "Team Kodi" is structured, and what else is going on in the background in support of that glorious code. The Kodi Foundation and the Board of Directors Kodi has a legal personality. We're incorporated in the US as the Kodi Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit - or a type of NGO, in common European parlance. This is the "company", it's the entity that receives donations, s…

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 …

Can you feel the excitement building in the air? Well, you should, as we are ready for our first Release Candidate for Kodi 21.0 "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 we'll get some regressions 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 that you wonderful testers come across. First, we'd like to make a few targeted announcements. Android users M…

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…

The Team Kodi PPA has long been a staple for Ubuntu (and similar) users wishing to use more recent, and less adulterated, versions of Kodi. It is with sadness that the team has come to a decision to officially retire the PPA due to the overhead of maintaining it. We want to express our sincere thanks to wsnipex for maintaining it for so many years, tirelessly making it available to countless users in the pursuit of making Kodi more easily accessible for the masses on many of the more popular Linux distributions. The Linux world is shifting slowly to packaged deployments and containers, and so, going forward, the team is looking to utilise Flatpak to hopefully give Linu…

Hi, everyone - I'm Keith, and while I now find myself President of the Kodi Foundation, my initial involvement with Kodi goes way back, as a humble user. Since our 20th anniversary came and went, I've been meaning to write a bit of a look back on how we got here - how I got here. This is the story of my - and the project's - journey. In the Beginning... In 2002, a couple guys saw the potential of being able to watch media on their own terms, through what was a new type of device: a "connected" TV device. They wanted to bring many things you'd traditionally need a computer for to the living room, operating it from the couch without needing a keyboard or mouse, controllin…

Okay, a late announcement - apologies, you can blame the summer holiday season. Or, if it's easier, you can just blame me as the bloke with the keyboard, that works equally well. Either way, many of you will already have noticed this, but, in case you haven't ... Team Kodi is here with the first point release of the 21.x "Omega" series. A range of bugfixes have been collected since the original release of Omega 21.0. Rather than list them all here, you can see the full changelog on Github, as usual. We always want to thank everyone who has helped us track down and fix any issues. We endeavour to minimise the issues everyone experiences, but with such a large project, a…

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…

Is Web 3.0 here? We don't know, but Kore 3.0 certainly is! Shiny, decentralized and software-based, it's ready to take over your old, centralized, atom-based remote. As a major release there are lots of changes, too many in fact to list here, but the main ones are: Migration to Google's Material 3 UI guidelines, which include: Complete review of themes and colors, adding support for light and dark modes based on the device's settings, and for dynamic colors, which change the UI colors depending on the current wallpaper (only available on Android 12 and up); Update of buttons, text boxes, icons, images, etc. to the latest UI standards; Review of transitions between sect…

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…

This is a little later in the development cycle than would normally be the case, but I'm sure you'll understand why. It's traditional, as we move towards the release of a new version of Kodi, to begin the process of naming what will become its successor. In recent years, "Leia" gave way to "Matrix", which moved aside for "Nexus", and then on to our current version, "Omega". There's a clue there to the pattern, so P-something it is. Our normal process would be to ask the forums and team for suggestions, edit these down to a shortlist, and then run an internal poll and choose a winner. However, the shortlisting was done a little quickly this time, and we ended up picking …

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 …