Kodi News: Kodi 22 "Piers" Alpha 3

Announcing the release of Kodi 22 “Piers” Alpha 3!

Usual words - the step from 21 to 22 is a major release, but it’s also an Alpha at this stage, so you’re going to get some bugs as well as funky new features. That is, of course, a major part of the point of early release software: please raise Github issues with full debug logs to help us resolve any regressions you wonderful testers come across.

Okay, what’s new in this version?

Changelog

Release highlights

• Added support for taglines in TV shows
• Added support for H264 AVCC subtitles
• Added support for full IANA language tags
• Added JSON RPC methods “Player.GetChapters” and “Player.OnPropertyChanged”
• Upgraded FFmpeg to v8.0.1
• Upgraded Python to v3.14.3
• Changed MySQL/MariaDB charset to utf8mb4 and collation to general_ci (case insensitive)

Video

• Improved Blu-ray support for both menus and playback
• Improved TV show episode handling for blu-ray
• Improved changing chapters in movies
• Improved seeking during tempo change

Audio

• Changed default samplerate from 44.1kHz to 48kHz
• Fixed missing 200ms of audio at the start of video playback
• Fixed occasional missing audio when changing playback speed
• Fixed AC3 audio duration being incorrect for non-48KHz content
• Improved handling of low-latency audio

Subtitles

• Fixed handling of WebVTT (ISOBMFF) subtitles
• Fixed PGS/VobSub subtitle selection for foreign audio tracks
• Fixed crash when handling some BCP47 language tags added in Alpha 2

Library

• Improved tagline handling for movies and TV shows

Games

• Added N64 support using software rendering
• Improved shader support
• Fixed Black screen for games with unaligned textures
• Fixed crash when changing resolution

Streaming and network

• Fixed playback of tcp:// streams
• Fixed media info display for strm:// streams
• Fixed occasional errors resuming UPnP playback

Stacks and compressed archives

• Added support for folder stacks, useful for DVD/Bluray folders
• Improved playback of folder stacks
• Improved handling media inside compressed archives
• Fixed handling of zip files greater than 4GB

Profiles

• Improved creating profiles in custom folders
• Fixed deadlock when viewing Weather with multiple profiles
• Highlighted current profile in profile selection dialog

Platforms

Android

• Fixed Auto Frame Rate (AFR) when resuming from standby
• Improved handling of Dolby Vision L5 metadata
• Improved handling of foreign subtitles

webOS Video

• General improvements for Dolby Vision support
• Improved handling of Dolby Vision L5 metadata
• Fixed tempo control

webOS Audio

• Improved audio passthrough support
• Improved volume handling in non-passthrough mode
• Improved Dolby Digital audio when using eARC
• Fixed AAC playback on some older versions of webOS

Windows

• Added front-to-back rendering
• Changed default audio output to XAUDIO and WASAPI
• Fixed Kodi unable to run on Windows 8.1

Linux

• Improved power management for systems without logind
• Extended range of keyboard keys and remote buttons
• Fixed long-pressing keyboard keys on Wayland

FreeBSD

• Extract to disk instead of RAM for large compressed archives

A little love for developers and security researchers

• (For researchers) Dropped some unused code that kept tripping CVEs
• (For developers) New KodiAI app on GitHub
• (For developers) Added support for Visual Studio 2026
• (For developers) Improved compatibility with C++23
• (For developers) Added meson support for building dependencies

Known Issues

• Kodi is incompatible with MySQL 9.6 (‘sets’ is now a reserved keyword). A fix will be devised for the next v22 prerelease.
• Blu-ray stream details aren’t saved in the library

Builds

If cutting-edge software is your thing, you can get Alpha 3 from here. Select your platform of choice, and look in the “Prerelease” section. Again, though, please: expect some breakage, don’t use this as your daily installation unless you know how to get things working again, and please share your experiences back with us so we can really get going on those bugs. And take a backup first!

As usual, in the full spirit of open source, you can see what’s changed since Alpha 2 here and from v21.3 here.

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