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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 TVHeadend servers, with individual settings like channel groups and hidden channels maintained per add-on instance. @AlwinEsch was the developer behind a lot of this, with support from @ksooo. Your favourite binary add-on may not support this capability yet, but we hope add-on developers introduce this into their projects soon. AV1 Video Support Several Kodi platforms now allow hardware decoding of AV1 media. The Inputstream API has been updated to support AV1 and this allows add-ons using inputsream.adaptive to play AV1 streams. Subtitles Rework Massive rework of the subtitle system was undertaken by @CastagnaIT making subtitle formats more consistent for development and maintenance, and enabling features that were previously not possible. Kodi now supports dynamic positioning of fonts, changing of border and background colours, subtitle positioning, improved multi-language support, and more. If you are a regular user of subtitles, jump on in and check it all out. Game (libretro) Savestate Support The GSOC 2020 project of @NikosSiak received some polishing touches before finally (!) being merged. With mentoring from @VelocityRa and @gusandrianos, and the assistance of @garbear, this has been a long time coming. This feature allows you to save game state at any time, even if games do not provide native savestate features themselves. Great for gamers, and times when you aren't watching Videos with Kodi ;) Windows HDR Support Full HDR support for the Windows Desktop platform has been implemented by @thexai along with many improvements throughout the Windows (DXVA/2) video pipeline. HDR is not available on non-Desktop, i.e. UWP Store (Xbox) versions. Improvements to allow more accurate ACES Filmic and HABLE tonemapping make even SDR video look better, and these capabilities are implemented for both UWP and Desktop versions of Kodi. NFSv4 Support Changes to allow NFSv4 support were implemented by @lrusak as previously we only supported NFSv3. There are some caveats with this (you must explicitly select either NFSv4 or NFSv3 for a source). Give it a try! Context Menu Consistency Improvements to right-click/long-press context menu handling were made by @ksooo in numerous areas. This makes the function of the context menu much more consistent over different windows, and enabled some new capabilities like the playback of albums directly from widgets, series resume, etc. to be added. Behind The Scenes The majority of changes are "under the hood" and invisible to users but improve the stability, performance, and safety of Kodi. API changes have been made to evolve Python and Binary add-ons and bring new skinning features. There are updates to Kodi dependencies on most if not all Kodi platforms. Fixes from regular use of code static-analysis tools. Database migration fixes for a smoother update ... and lots more. There are too many individual changes to detail everything. If you would like to know more, please look back through the Nexus Alpha to RC2 release announcements and review the GitHub changelog here. Time does not stand still. Branches are forked and development on Kodi v21 (codename: "Omega") is already underway. Thank you again for your continued support as we continue to make Kodi great! Help Wanted! If you experience any issues or find any remaining bugs, please post in the General Support section of our forum. If you have fixes for issues please submit a pull request with your changes to our master branch on GitHub. We also welcome users who want to help answer questions in the forum or write articles for the wiki. Donate To show support and appreciation for Kodi, please consider making a donation or purchasing merchandise such as a T-shirt or Raspberry Pi case (Nexus items will be available soon). Your donations help us operate, covering operating expenses, hardware and software licences for developers, and legal fees, as well as paying for team members to attend industry/FLOSS events and our annual conference. Availability Kodi 20.0 "Nexus" is being pushed to the usual channels right now, both our own download pages and various app stores/repositories, so should be with your devices shortly. It's worth noting that, for the first time in a while, we've cleared all known blockers, so all supported platforms will be updated just as soon as the various app stores process things. View the full article

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. 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). If you're interested, you can read the merged PRs here. If you want to read back on the full history of v19 itself, or of previous versions, you can find the corresponding articles in the relevant blog posts. Android/Windows Store Deployment For Android specifically, please note that we are unable to provide this update via Google Play. An updated Google requirement demands that apps now target API level 31 (Android 12) as a minimum, while Kodi v19 targets API level 29 (Android 10). As such, we're unable to upload 19.5 to the Play Store, although 19.3 will remain available until 20.0 is available for the masses. However, for those who want the new release, 19.5 can be downloaded from our servers and installed manually. More than that, though, for both the Play Store and Microsoft App store, there's simply too much throwaway work. With the final release of v20 "Nexus" extremely close, as well as difficulties with the Google Play store submission for v19, there is no practical possibility to do store submissions for 19.5 - as such, this release will NOT be released on either Google Play or the Microsoft App store. As always, we provide the packages for all platforms on the Kodi mirror website if you wish to install them on your device. View the full article

So... here we have a second Release Candidate for Kodi v20 "Nexus". While we have a fairly small number of fixes, they are fairly major. 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 devs that choose to roll up their sleeves and fix an issue. 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. Android Users A note for any users who are running Kodi on Android 11+. Android has had a number of large permission changes that we, and all apps released on the Google Play Store, have had to adhere to. The major change is permissions to locally attached storage (i.e. USB disks). If you use USB storage for your media on these versions of Android, after first run do the following to allow Kodi access to these disks: Go to Android Settings Apps and then "See all apps" (or just straight to Kodi if it's in Recently Opened) Tap on Kodi Go to Permissions Files and media, and change to Allow all the time We know many people use Nvidia Shield devices, so here's a specific link to Nvidia customer help. Add-on Devs There was an API break after Beta 1 was released. The details can be seen on the forums (and of course discussed if any assistance is required) at https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=370707. Essentially, if you use either the Python InfoTagVideo or VideoStreamDetail APIs, some functions had their variable names changed to bring consistency to the new set of APIs introduced earlier in Nexus. We strongly advise users to always update to the latest test releases if you are on the bleeding edge, however if you are on older releases (e.g. Alphas or Beta 1), you may want to block updates on your add-ons as dev's update their add-ons to target RC and the final V20 release. Release notes Database A couple of fixes have gone in to resolve database migration issues from v19. The first of these is the EPG database migration. This fixes the problem with the EPG loading and then disappearing. Thanks @ksooo for the prompt fix. A second DB migration issue that only occurred on the Microsoft UWP platform (Xbox and UWP desktop) has been fixed by @thexai . This was an odd one, as the code that dealt with the failure was old code (6+ years). It was traced to an odd race condition that only manifested on the UWP platforms, however the root cause potentially could happen on any other platform. General A fix for playlist detection for both Audio and Video was made by @ksooo - https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/22270 Platform Specific Linux @popcornmix has fixed an issue for DRMPrime on Linux. This allows hardware formats like Broadcom 8-bit (SAND128) and 10-bit (P030) can now be correctly rendered with the latest Mesa. macOS A fix to allow Kodi to execute on macOS 10.13 has been made. We would still strongly suggest users use a newer version (10.14+), however this allows users still on 10.13 to run Kodi. A regression for macOS reading actual disks was resolved by @enen92 . As part of this, the libcdio driver was also fixed to enable disk usage on Apple Silicon native builds. Windows A fix to a crash that only occurred on Windows Debug builds has been resolved. This didn't affect users of the actual RC1 release, but Windows devs who would attempt to execute Kodi as a Debug build were quickly halted. PVR An issue around multiple resume dialogs has been fixed by @emveepee - https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/22247 Teletext Another Teletext issue has been resolved by @repojohnray. @repojohnray has contributed a number of fixes for v20 to help increase the reliability and safety of Kodi. Although this was only a small number of fixes, they all help make the final release of "Nexus" better. Thanks to users who have provided issues and logs to assist with the resolution of these issues. As always, and we are quite confident in its stability - however, always backup your configs before testing, and please let us know of any regressions or issues you find. If you want to take the plunge, you can get RC 2 from here. Select your platform of choice, and look in the "Prerelease" section. If you wish you can see all the gory details of what's changed between v20 RC 2 and RC 1 here. For further information on changes for the entire Nexus release so far, we have highlighted most of the major features/changes in the previous Alpha/Beta blogs, go to our website to catch up on them here View the full article

Here we go folks, ramping things up and we have the first Release Candidate (RC) for Kodi "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 devs that choose to roll up their sleeves and fix an issue. 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. Addon Devs We'll put this at the top of this post, as there was an API break after Beta 1 was released. The details can be seen on the forums (and of course discussed if any assistance is required). Essentially, if you use either the Python InfoTagVideo or VideoStreamDetail APIs, some functions had their variable names changed to bring consistency to the new set of APIs introduced earlier in Nexus. We strongly advise users to always update to the latest test releases if you are on the bleeding edge, however if you are on older releases (e.g. Alphas or Beta 1), you may want to block updates on your addons as dev's update their addons to target RC and the final V20 release. Release notes Addons A BREAKING API change was introduced for the VideoStreamDetail and InfoTagVideo Python APIs. This affects set APIs that were introduced in the v20 development cycle. We would not normally do such a change when we enter Beta phase, but we believe fixing this now would cause fewer issues for all the addon devs out there for v21 (supporting 2 different APIs for v20/v21). Details around what is affected can be seen in the PR. In addition, further details can be seen and discussed on the forums. A number of bundled addons have been updated. This should reduce the number of addons that immediately do updates on installation of RC1. Scrapers Due to the above breaking API change, the TVDB TV Show scraper was updated to prevent breaking. The result is that the updated scraper will be broken on any Kodi v20 release prior to this RC1 release. If you are using an older v20 install, then you need to update for continued functioning of the TMDB TV Show scraper. In addition, we took this opportunity to fix a long outstanding issue with the Python TV Show scrapers described here. The result is that if you are adding new episodes to existing TV shows in your library, you need to refresh the show to download the new episode guide. If you are using NFO files, the episode guide in those files needs updating also. TMDB TV Shows and TV Maze scrapers have been updated, with TVDB v4 to be updated in the near future. More details can be found here. Games @lrusak fixed a crash that was introduced into Beta1. Some Linux users were finding Kodi was crashing on startup (link). @lrusak again fixed a black screen issue with standalone games (link). General Add support for action "play" to many more items such as widgets/favourites on the homescreen (link). Fix a regression with duplicate/incorrect context menu entries (link). @ksooo fixed another regression for addons that caused the "continue watching" context menu not to show the resume time (link). @repojohnray has been providing a number of fixes/cleanups lately that are targeting memory leaks. Subtitles and a number of Linux specific areas have had improvements made to them. A new contributer @larrignon has fixed a logging message that occurred when an empty directory was searched by scrapers (link). Music Fix crash when queuing multichannel audio files. This fixes a regression introduced in Beta 1 (link). Fix default fallback image to be more relevant to a music item (CD Case instead of a Folder) (link). Platform Specific Android @joseluismarti has contributed a number of cleanups/fixes for Android. @a1rwulf bumped our SDK target to 31. Along with a number of fixes @joseluismarti contributed over the past few months, this has allowed us to finally do a release to the Google Play Store. RC1 has been released to the Testing channel, and we'll ramp up deployment over the next week or so to more users in the Testing channel macOS @enen92 has made a number of fixes to what is know as the macOS native windowing implementation. This won't affect too many people right now, as the default release uses SDL windowing, however anyone building the native macOS ARM version (or using the test builds) should see a number of improvements around windowing. Add speech to text service implementation (usable from keyboard dialog) Windows and Xbox Kodi RC 1 has been submitted to the Microsoft Store as an update. Users should start receiving this shortly. Be aware that you may have to uninstall and reinstall your Xbox version, because the OS is not updating cleanly. Skinning Fix a crash if an include has an empty condition. This was reported by @jurialmunkey and was an effect when a PARAM was used in the include condition that may have been empty (link). Fix a crash that could occur in the event of a textbox that was too small for a font used, and therefore the text would not fit (link). Estuary Specifics Music: Extend context menu functionality, add ability to play albums directly from home screen Video: Extend context menu functionality PVR: New home screen widget for saved searches PVR: Reworked home screen widget for timers PVR: Some smaller visual changes to the OSD and the home screen widgets Add possibility to use the play button (on remote, keyboard, ...) to start playback of many different items shown on the home screen (e.g. songs, movies, episodes, Live-TV channels, recordings, albums, TV shows, single seasons, movie sets - just try it out...) Subtitles Fix a regex for Sami subtitles (link). Teletext @enen92 has made a few fixes for teletext usage. A crash and a usability issue were resolved (link). Another crash was resolved (link). Flashing teletext was blinking at an extremely fast pace. This fixes an regression introduced by a large core change regarding time related functions (link). UPNP Fix some crashes occurring on startup if UPnP items were on homescreen widgets. Check the PR for gritty details (link). Video A new feature has been introduced to allow the possibility of 'continue watching' (aka resume) for certain video folders from the context menu of several folder locations (eg Movie Sets, TV Shows including seasons, and more). The best way to see more info about this is to see the PR. PVR Multi-instance support for PVR client-addons (first implemented by pvr.hts, more to come) Persistent EPG searches Automatic cleanup of texture database and removal of related stale image files Add possibility to refresh channel logos in the Channel manager Selection of items to delete when resetting the PVR database Various performance optimisations, larger code refactoring Favourites New favourites window, providing different views and other enhancements Thank you once again to everyone who has contributed to this release. This is the our first Release Candidate for Nexus, and we are quite confident in its stability - however, always backup your configs before testing, and please let us know of any regressions or issues you find. If you want to take the plunge, you can get RC 1 from here. Select your platform of choice, and look in the "Prerelease" section. As usual - well, it is open source - you can see what's changed between v20 RC 1 and Beta 1 here. For further information on changes for the entire Nexus release so far, we have highlighted most of the major features/changes in the previous Alpha/Beta blogs, go to our website to catch up on them here View the full article