Matt

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

After all, "that which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet" - okay, Shakespeare maybe had a point, but, for obvious reasons, he didn't know anything about software. For us, names matter because they usually herald a new release, a major change, and, yes, lots of lovely, cuddly new features. So, as is traditional as we move through our current release cycle - Kodi v20 "Nexus" recently entered beta - it's time to announce the name for what will become Kodi v21. As usual, we ran a forum post for suggestions, and we then worked through them to remove the obviously-profane, legislatively-dubious or downright impossible to type quickly, and then put it to a Kodi Team vote. So, with no further ado ... < adopts best Max Quordlepleen voice > Ladies, gentlemen, monocellular and inorganic lifeforms, non-terrestrial beings, sentient devices ... a big hand, please, for... Kodi v21 "Omega" < sounds of muffled trumpets and applause > Don't get overly excited about this version arriving any time soon, as v20 "Nexus" isn't fully-cooked yet and there's still much life left in the 19.x "Matrix" branch. However, you now know what's coming, and, if you're inclined, you can now follow development of this specific branch. View the full article

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, screensaver, vis. Thanks to @AlwinEsch as always for the huge amount of work supporting Kodi's addon interfaces. Fix/refactor "multi instance" GUI settings for addons. This work carries on from the PVR binary addons being able to have multiple backend instances (link). New id3 tag metadata stream support for PVR Radio addons (link). Add new SetVideoResolution with max resolution (link). Database Clean DB was previously broken in earlier Nexus builds. This has now been fixed by @enen92 (link). Disc Update libbluray to 1.3.2 for all platforms (link). Fix a "double free" issue when ejecting a disk (link) - Sidenote: thank you @prahal for your first contribution to Kodi core. Handle BD_EVENT_DISCONTINUITY (link). Filesystem UPNP fixes for picture handling (link). First time contributor @ihipop improved support for subtitle formats when accessed via UPNP DLNA (link). General Fix bookmark resume for .strm files (link). Fix jsonrpc Player.GetProperties response when playback from a widget is done (link). Fix race condition in CJobmanager causing crashes (link) - Sidenote: @neo1973 is our newest team member, welcome to the team! Application refactors. A large effort by @notspiff refactoring some very old code into more manageable chunks. Assorted improvements found by static analysis tools. Thanks @Rechi. Write correct duration to tracks in M3U playlists (link). Improvements to the header inclusions for a lot of areas of Kodi. This is a step to improve build times in general that mostly aims to reduce the number of components rebuilt when changes were made in a few extremely common objects. Thanks @notspiff, @ksooo. @rubpa has diagnosed and fixed a race condition in picture thumbnail loading (link). Input Mouse cleanup (link). network Another first time contributor @jjlin added support for HTTPS proxies (link). Platform Specific Unix based platforms Android and Apple platforms now ship with Python 3.11 built in. Python 3.11 is a very notable release due to considerable improvements in CPython regarding speed. Checkout the python release notes for more info. Android Android builds will now be built as RelwithDebinfo by default for our Jenkins builds. This means nightlies and most other Android builds built by PRs will be with the more optimised RelwithDebinfo instead of Debug. This was done as some issues being investigated by devs was found to be purely cause by the slower Debug build types. A number of improvements by @joseluismarti. More class parameters have been added to allow more corner cases for starting android apps (link). macOS Prevent crash on exit (link). TVOS Sensitivity on the Remote has been reduced, and the tooltip and setting has been made more intuitive by @sy6sy2. Windows Remember window position of Kodi when run in windowed mode (link). First time contributor @sryze fixed a cmake warning for windows building (link). A new setting to allow setting the peak luminance for a display (link). Fixes to slow python usage on UWP platforms (eg Xbox) (link). PVR Assorted EPG search fixes. Added possibility to browse available PVR client add-ons from PVR settings. Channels and Recordings now can be sorted by provider. Various fixes and performance improvements. Large refactoring improvements. Favourites Replace favourites dialog with new favourites window, providing different views and other enhancements. Skinning Added a new infobool System.Setting(hideunwatchedepisodethumbs) (link). Estuary specifics PVR Channel Manager redesign. Click on PVR Home screen section icon now opens Channels window again. Some smaller changes to the PVR OSD. Extend music context menu functionality, add ability to play albums directly from home screen. Extend video context menu functionality. Subtitles Fix for 3D MVC subtitles not appearing correct when frame packed (link). Video Inputstream support for AV1 codec (link). Don't attempt to use hardware AV1 decode if forcing software decoding. This fixes AV1 thumbnail generation on devices that don't support AV1 hardware decoding (link). Thank you once again to everyone who has contributed to this release. This is the first Beta release of 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 Beta 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 Alpha 3 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 blogs, go to our website to catch up on them here. View the full article

This is perhaps a little short notice, but Jason from Flirc - a long-time friend of Kodi - is hosting an ask-me-anything on Cordcutters on 9th November 2022. We just wanted to let you know, and give him the chance to say a few words about what's going on. I originally made Flirc, my first product, because I was frustrated that I couldn't use our same television remote control with Kodi. That worked really well for a long time, but, as the years passed, and our Kodi boxes evolved, I became increasingly irritated with the growing number of remote controls and the state of universal remotes. I thought I could do it better. My vision for our first remote always favored a Kodi-esque environment - so much so that half our team now is comprised of Kodi leaders. Nate Thomas, who helped lead Kodi's growth, and Sam Fisher, an integral part of visual design and Kodi animations, joined me on what would be a three year journey. The Skip 1s Universal Remote is our first remote built on a strong foundation with big future plans. We plan on having tight integration with Kodi and custom products as we continue our journey. But Flirc wouldn't exist if not for the Kodi community and their support. So I'll be hosting an AMA on cordcutters. Please stop by and ask me anything, or leave a question. Feel free to ask me anything about the remote, future plans, or my personal journey with cancer that lead me to start Flirc. I'll try and answer everyone. Wednesday, November 9th: 10 AM PT, 1PM ET, 18:00 GMT, 19:00 CET, 23:30 IST, 05:00 AEDT. Ask me anything! - Jason View the full article

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 sections and within sections; Redesign of most of Kore's screens, namely: The Remote screen, adding the current playback state, and better media controls, allowing for direct control of what's playing; The Now Playing panel, adding the current playback state and media control buttons; The Movies, TV Shows, Music and Addons screens, which went through a redesign, particularly on the actions section. All the previously available actions are still there, they just got moved around (well, except for the IMDb link, which was often broken, and therefore was replaced with a generic Google search). Note that the "Play locally" function is now called "Stream", which is more appropriate and concise; The Artist details screen, to show the artist albums beneath its general information instead of on a separate tab; The connection status indication (connecting, not connected or connected) has been improved and made explicit on the various screens; The top app bar is collapsible where appropriate, and the remote section allows the background image to use up all the screen; Redesign of the notifications Integrating them with Android's media notifications, which allows for better control of what's playing when Kore is not in the foreground. Note that, if the media notification disappears after a few minutes even though something is playing on Kodi, that's caused by aggressive battery optimization settings which forcefully stop the notification. This happens with some manufacturers that don't follow Android's guidelines, in a futile and artificial attempt to extend the battery life, and the solution is to check the device's battery settings applied to Kore (the way to do it depends on the specific device, more info can be obtained at https://dontkillmyapp.com/ ); ... and lots and lots of code cleaning and generic bug fixing (like for instance, fixing the access to media storage in the local files section). Given the level of changes, there certainly are bugs lurking around. If you find one, please let us know at the forum or on GitHub so we can make Kore a better remote. Hope you like it. View the full article

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 following pages — Music Video, Movies, Tv Show, Seasons, and Episode. I started with the videoid_int page, which contains information about a music video. Before that, I noticed that we didn’t have a working Music video page (previously implemented). There were some inconsistencies with its routing, with the json-rpc calls which fetched the metadata and with elm json decoders. So, I fixed these issues first. I worked on the front end and created its UI from scratch which included rework of the music-video card UI. The basic approach in order to implement video playback functionality was by using JSON-RPC Files.PreparedDownload method, we can get a PreparedDownload path for the file which we want to play by making a request in this manner : {"jsonrpc":"2.0", "id":1, "method":"Files.PrepareDownload", "params":{ "path": "/home/xyz/Videos/test.mp4" }} We can expect the returned PreparedDownload path to be something like - "vfs/%2fhome%2fxyz%2fVideos%2ftest.mp4" which we can be fed into the src of the html5 video player (“http://localhost:8080/vfs/%2fhome%2fxyz%2fVideos%2ftest.mp4”) An issue arose when we tried to do so — CORS Policy. Since we were sending an HTTP request to fetch the JSON data from the Kodi RPC server, we were facing issues with it. Therefore to work on it during development, I suggested using an extension in a browser that allows CORS. Web sockets, which were used to retrieve json data, could have made things much simpler, but during development, things don’t always go according to plan :). /images/blog/mohdshaheer1-720x350.webp Videoid_int page In Chorus 2, the video playback was done through a pop-up window that had an HTML5 Player. To make the user experience better, I implemented a modal for it. In a similar manner, I implemented the video playback functionality for the movideid_int page where I implemented the page’s UI from scratch, worked on its routing, modified json decoders, and created new ones from scratch. /images/blog/mohdshaheer2-600x320.gif movideid_int page Tvshow pages required more time and effort than others. I implemented its UI, front-end, and backend from scratch. I also had to create two new pages from scratch — The seasons and the Episode page. I created new objects and decoders for each of them and wrote JSON RPC calls to fetch data for them. /images/blog/mohdshaheer3-720x355.png Tvshowid_int page /images/blog/mohdshaheer4-720x350.png Season page /images/blog/mohdshaheer5-600x287.gif Episode page Another functionality that I worked on was “Filter functionality” for all the pages. I created a fully working front-end and wrote filter methods that would filter the objects based on particular fields such as genre, artist, album, etc. /images/blog/mohdshaheer6-720x350.png Filter functionality + reworked Movie card UI While working on the functionalities, I also reworked the UI of previously implemented cards and pages. For example: Top Music Page /images/blog/mohdshaheer7-720x350.png Before /images/blog/mohdshaheer8-720x350.png After Album page /images/blog/mohdshaheer9-720x350.png Before /images/blog/mohdshaheer10-720x354.png After On September 5th, the official coding phase of GSoC ended. It was a great learning experience and my first internship in freshman year. I learned a lot and would love to keep contributing to Kodi on this project and help in any way possible. Again I would like to thank my mentor - Razze - and Kodi Community for being so supportive, and helpful, and for making sure to give positive feedback about my work which kept me motivated. This post was originally published on Medium. View the full article

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 require updates from the various binary addons that will start to happen, so if you are interested in helping your favourite PVR addon to implement this, check out the above PVR.HTS PR, as well as the following PVR.Demo PR Database ksooo has been optimising various things in our db wrappers for better performance (link) DVD Fix DVD Menu indicators for DRMPrime (link) Filesystem Fix NFS for Windows platforms after some recent NFS updates Several NFS improvements/cleanups Initial NFS4 implementation (link) Font/Glyh Several improvements around our Font/Glyph Handling code from several team members (ksooo, thexai, sarbes) - improvements that should help low power machines in particular, but all platforms generally. Harbuzz glyph caching improvements (link) Fix some inconsistencies with RTL languages and certain skinning components (link) Games Improvements/cleanups regarding controllers (link) Fix crash if controller info files don't have correct info (link) General Rechi has done a bunch of leg work implementing improvements from Static analysis tools like CPPCheck (link) and ClangTidy (link) Remove obsolete addons from Core Kodi install (link) Fix wrong player playlist type for STRM file playback (link) Input Fix using mouse to drag/drop some controls (link) Platform Specific Linux GBM Ability to set HDR Output (link) MacOS Allow the OSX arm64 (Apple Silicon) build to correctly find appropriate binary addons from repositories. Windows Fix incorrect window positioning when transitioning window to fullscreen and back (link) PVR ksooo continues updating/refining/fixing all things PVR related Skinning Estuary Show titles when "Flatten Hierarchy" setting enabled (link) Subtitles Further improvements/refinements to subtitles from CastagnaIT Video Fix for 3D MVC Playback (link) Once again, consider this an alpha release. Backup your configs before testing, and please let us know of any regressions or issues If you want to take the plunge, you can get Alpha 3 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 Alpha 2 and Alpha 3 here. View the full article

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 API that correctly represented the new data structure and was built using more scalable technology. We included a transformation layer that continued to allow the old legacy APIs to function using the new data structure, but it takes a lot of time and money to run so we can't leave it up forever. In the two years since, we tried easing the transition away from the legacy APIs: We announced that we would eventually be shutting down the legacy APIs, but stated that we would provide enough time for developers to update their code. We reached out to key systems that rely on our API, like Kodi, to ensure a smooth transition. We contracted an experienced Kodi developer to write updated TV and movie scrapers that work off our new API and the latest versions of Kodi. Kodi's board graciously offered feedback throughout this process. We've restructured our moderator and support tools and teams to make sure we can support developers and users switching to the new API. Note that as before, our API remains entirely free for end users of the Kodi TheTVDb library scraper (and, indeed, for many other projects). We do have a subscription service for anyone wishing to support our site, but it is entirely optional and not required to use the scraper. Our current plan is to turn off our legacy APIs at the end of 2022. All Kodi users should switch to our official TV scraper by that time, as all other TheTVDB scrapers will cease to function. Anyone that wants to try out our movie scraper as well is welcome to do so, but the scrapers are entirely separate and do not require each other to function. Note that this conversation is very much about scrapers, but the API change may well impact other add-ons which use the legacy model. We don't want to adversely impact any users, so please get in touch if you're a developer who might be affected. I hope everyone can understand how we got to where we are and why we need to take these next steps. We're available for support within the scraper threads (TV, movies), but prefer issues to be reported directly on the Github repos (TV, movies). Detailed information about configuration is available on the wiki (TV, movies). Thank you all so much for your ongoing support of TheTVDB through the years. View the full article

Welcome to the website for the PRESHOW Experience!

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 data throughput - Android: Adjust buffer size/duration for TrueHD IEC. More local app icons should render fully in Kodi - Android: CFileAndroidApp::ReadIcon: Add support for icons provided a.... Fix a packaging error for binary python modules (pycryptodome) - Android: packaging: don't delete cryptodome libraries from depends i.... XBox Fixes some specific H.265 video crashes - XBox: DXVA2: Allows the use of more than 16 decoding surfaces for H265 Full HD or less. Python Android and Apple systems have had their Python version bumped to 3.9.13 in accordance with the latest release of the CPython 3.9 series. Of note, there have been fixes by the CPython team specifically for issues raised by Kodi community members around some crashes. Thanks to those members raising the upstream issues, and the fantastic CPython team for fixing them. Please note, this does not affect any of our Windows releases, or if you are using Linux. Filesystems Fix a regression that caused thumbnails to not appear when accessed from "remote" filesystems (e.g. WebDAV) - fixed: URIUtils::IsInternetStream() didn't properly handle filesystem.... Closed Captions Fix an instance of Closed Captions not working. A forum member was able to provide an extremely helpful sample that allowed @enen92 to track down an issue with closed captions not working correctly. Incidentally, this also fixes Closed Captions for some Inputstream.Adaptive streams as confirmed by @CastagnaIT. Subtitles Multiple WebVTT fixes Subtitles: WebVTT: Fix X-TIMESTAMP-MAP LOCAL parsing. Subtitles: WebVTT: Clear all overlays just before creating a new parser. Subtitles: WevVTT: Sync cue timestamps with period start. Bluray Fix BluRay resume issues - Discs: Fix resume of Blurays and BluRay ISOs (state serializer). Thumbnail Images Reduce "quality" of thumbnail creation - FFmpegImage: Reduce quality a tiny bit NOTE: An advanced setting is available for those users who wish to alter the default further. More information can be found on the wiki. Skinning A couple of skinning changes have been introduced. gui: info: Add VideoPlayer.Art(type) and positional variants and gui: info: Add Addon.Setting* infos. Skin timers - skinning: Skin timer implementation. Removal of player.DisplayAfterSeek - gui: info: Remove Player.DisplayAfterSeek. Skip border infill - Adds GUI hint for skins to skip border infill. Moving speed - gui: Implemented movingspeed to mover/resize controls. Diffuse fading animations - Added diffuse fading animation effect . VideoPlayer.Art(type) and positional variants - gui: info: Add VideoPlayer.Art(type) and positional variants. Skinners, have a look on the forums for more info. Once again, consider this an alpha release. Backup your configs before testing, and please let us know of any regressions or issues If you want to take the plunge, you can get Alpha 2 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 Alpha 1 and Alpha 2 here. View the full article