Matt

I didn’t get to see many new releases this year, and I’m sure I missed some great ones along the way. So I’d love to hear from the community: What were your favorite movies of the year? Any hidden gems that flew under the radar? Looking forward to seeing what everyone recommends!

I am only loading trivia on here from the old site for people that have explicitly given me permission to do so. You may be able to get someone to share stuff with you on the discord. There is a link to it on the bottom right on the home page. I hope to do a lot more with trivia in PreShow in 2026, so hopefully that will help to take care of anything you may not get.

Using the context menu as you are doing is how you have to do it if your skin doesn't have a PreShow button. Some skins have a separate button that launches PreShow and also hides the loading. Here are 2 skins that have been modified to work with PreShow: https://preshowexperience.com/files/category/7-skins/ I need to make a guide on how to do this, but it is a skin issue that I can't change from within PreShow. Kodi doesn't allow the play button to be modified.

What scraper(s) are you using? The current imdb scraper has an issue currently. I'll be fixing that and probably coming out with my own trailers source in early 2026.

Using the context menu as you are doing is how you have to do it if your skin doesn't have a PreShow button. Some skins have a separate button that launches PreShow and also hides the loading. Here are 2 skins that have been modified to work with PreShow: https://preshowexperience.com/files/category/7-skins/ I need to make a guide on how to do this, but it is a skin issue that I can't change from within PreShow. Kodi doesn't allow the play button to be modified.

It is the season for giving, so, for those who want the latest and greatest, this is for you: hot on the heels of Kodi 22 "Piers" Alpha 1 (and Kodi 21.3 "Omega"), we present the perhaps predictably-titled Alpha 2. 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? Video/audio Upgraded to FFmpeg 8 Added HEIF/HEIC support Fixed playing streams with more than 256 audio+video+subtitles tracks Improved audio channel handling Improved subtitle selection for "forced_only" subtitles Library/Sources and Management Added Season Plot Added Movie/TV Show Original Language Fixed bug in Alpha 1 where scanning fails if local NFO files are present Improved Video Version importing PVR Fixed Daylight Saving Time switching issues Weather New Weather Skinning API Various fixes and improvements for the Home widget and Weather window Python Upgraded to Python 3.13.7 Added ability to set available fanart Platforms Windows Multiple Kodi instances can now be run simultaneously Android New dialog explaining microphone permission macOS Fixed high CPU usage in the background LG webOS Improvements for new Media Pipeline Fixed very bright subtitles and GUI when playing HDR / DolbyVision content Fixed subtitles sometimes not displaying If cutting-edge software is your thing, you can get Alpha 2 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 1 here and from v21.3 here. View the full article

The more observant of you will have noticed that we've had some issues getting this version out to everyone, so some of you will have received this already depending on what channel you use (Flatpak, Google Play, winget community repos...). No matter, it's here for everyone now. While work is well underway on our next major release, with Alphas already out for Kodi 22.x "Piers", this doesn't mean we've given up on 21.x "Omega", as that's very much still our current release. So, with minimal fanfare, we present to you a package of changes, bug fixes and backports that we like to call Kodi 21.3 "Omega". Full changelog from 21.2 here. Release Summary Major user-facing changes include: Video Added HDR support on Xbox One Fixed Blu-ray playback on Linux Fixed audio/subtitle issues when resuming Blu-rays Fixed handling of HDR10 light metadata changes Fixed subtitle selection for ISO 639-1 (two-letter) language codes Library/Sources and Management Improved speed of video library rescans Fixed multi-episode files overwriting the first episode Fixed info dialog for certain Movie Versions Fixed some false positives detecting Movie Versions Music Fixed CDDB lookups using Gnudb.org's CDDB API Fixed album search failing for artist names Audio Fixed rare Pipewire crash when connecting/removing audio devices PVR Fixed crash when a PVR stream is stopped via remote app Peripherals Added support for Turkish keyboards on Linux Fixed enabling and disabling Pulse-Eight CEC adapters Fixed the Delete and Alternative Insert keys on macOS Fixed minor visual glitches when managing peripherals Addons Fixed updating add-ons after 25 days of inactivity (extended to ~68 years) Skin/GUI Fixed busy dialog crash when multiple dialogs are opened Fixed suspend dialog remaining open after the system wakes up Improved touch support for slider dialog arrows Network Added support for HTTP Basic Authentication Fixed some network streams failing due to interrupted HTTP/2 transfers Updated libnfs to v6 for embedded platforms Updated CA certificates to 2025-07-15 from the Mozilla CA certificate store I know we always say this, but, genuinely - sincere thanks go out to everyone who's helped to identify, isolate or fix any issues. If you know of anything that's still irking you, please, post in the forums, or raise an issue on Github, as we can't fix what we don't know about. 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 21.x installation - indeed, this will happen automatically on many platforms. However, as for all software installations, back up your userdata beforehand if you've any doubts or have anything you can't afford to lose (and definitely do this if you're going for a major version upgrade). A list of all changes for this version can be found at GitHub. If you want to read back on the full history of v21 itself, or of previous versions, you can find the corresponding articles in the relevant blog posts. Application deployment on different platforms (notably the Microsoft Store) can vary considerably due to circumstances outside of our control, so just be patient, and the update will inevitably find its way through. Windows Store/Android Deployment Due to the internal and external hoops we need to jump through, it might be a little while before the update appears for you, and that's before our usual staged approach to deployment. Sit tight, and it will be with you in due course (maybe the next week or two). View the full article

Merry Christmas 2025 from PreShow Experience This is a 4k Merry Christmas bumper with 5.1 audio. File Information Submitter Matt Submitted 12/11/2025 Category Holiday Bumpers View File

Thanks for uploading that. I have a copy of it somewhere that I showed during one of my horror movie nights a few years ago, and it did a good job of setting the mood.

I haven't seen Pumkinhead in a really long time. How did it hold up?

Anyone watch any good horror movies this year?

Here are all the current holiday bumpers: https://preshowexperience.com/files/category/17-holiday-bumpers/

The image needs to be in a subfolder.

PreShow doesn't have an option to pause between videos. The workaround would be to create a black image and use the slideshow module between them to set the pause time, or to create a short blank video to play between the elements that is set to whatever time you want the pause duration to be. Out of curiosity, why do you want the pause?