Matt

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 I originally made Flirc, my first product, because I was frustrated that I couldn't use our same television remote control with Kodi.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