Kodi News

The Kodi Foundation: Who We Are, What We Do

Team Kodi — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 19:38:20 GMT

So, a slightly different topic for a change.

We talk a lot about the Kodi software, its development and releases, and that's fine, as that's what we're all about and that's what everyone ultimately sees. However, we thought we'd change the subject a little and explore what goes on behind the scenes: how "Team Kodi" is structured, and what else is going on in the background in support of that glorious code.

The Kodi Foundation and the Board of Directors

Kodi has a legal personality. We're incorporated in the US as the Kodi Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit - or a type of NGO, in common European parlance. This is the "company", it's the entity that receives donations, signs hosting agreements, protects our trademarks, and owns any assets and intellectual property. However, we don't have any of the trappings of a regular company: we have no employees, minimal assets, and no property. We're wholly run by volunteers and a few carefully-chosen outside agents for e.g. legal work.

The Kodi Foundation is then made up of members of Team Kodi. It's not mandatory to join - you can be a Team member and not join - but it's the Foundation members who get a vote on major decisions. Probably the most regular of those decisions is the appointment of our Board of Directors - again, Team members, all volunteers, each of whom serves a two-year term as part of a Board of five members. The Board then manages Kodi: funds, publicity, taxes, lawyers, copyright bodies, banks, sponsors, non-profit oversight, and so on. There's also a whole raft of internal administrivia - member lists, permissions, access rights, what's filed where, who's responding to what, why are we getting these emails, no we don't want your adverts.

As both a Team and as a Board, we hold regular Zoom meetings to discuss progress, schedules, and any related issues that may crop up from time to time. As you can imagine, this can be quite a challenge given the timezones we cover, so everything is available afterwards for Team members to catch up on.

The Greater Team Kodi

It's not just paperwork, though. It's easy to think of Kodi as a bunch of lines of code, hammered out in the small hours by pizza-fuelled developers, and that's not necessarily too far wide of the mark in some ways. But there's also so much more: even to maintain that code needs discipline, a release manager, code reviews, Github admin. We have people who look after build servers and DNS records, who administer our email and collaboration tools, who feed and water everything from backup servers to the server that hosts the forums: software upgrades, patches, hardware replacement, migrations. And we have people to write posts like this, to design our graphics for each release, to modify skins, to compile and build new releases.

Funding it All

As mentioned above, this is all voluntary: nobody at Kodi gets paid anything for what they do. We all do this as a hobby, because we enjoy it in some way. And what makes that possible is primarily you, our users.

We generate a few tens of thousands of dollars a year. Most of that comes directly from donations - that little orange button in the top right; some comes from merchandise sales such as T-shirts or royalties on branded Flirc goods; and the rest comes from corporate sponsorship, which is an ephemeral beast at best. You'll perhaps notice that we've always steered clear of advertising, so there are no popups on this site, no banner ads, and nothing within the application itself: that's very deliberate, and we work hard to keep it like that.

On that note, we'd like to give a huge shout out to Flirc right now, as they've just started selling a Raspberry Pi 5 branded Kodi case. This is the only company authorised to use our brand on a product, and the only company who gives us royalties: we get a small amount for every case sold. They've been consistently helping us out financially for the last few years and, without them, we would be attending many fewer conferences.

And where does the money go? We have hosting costs, professional service fees (lawyers, copyright specialists, accountants), banking fees. While we sometimes get sponsored hardware, we have to pay for servers, storage, bandwidth. If someone is working on a feature and they need a particular piece of hardware that we can't get donated, we'll buy them something (e.g. to assist with porting Kodi to a new platform). Perhaps our biggest costs are conferences: the Open Source world thrives on community, so we have tried to get people representing us at FOSDEM, Embedded Linux Conference, OSS Summit, SCALE, and the Open Source Leadership Summit - although the majority of funds goes to getting as many members as possible to attend our annual developer conference, Kodi Devcon.

We think we do pretty well on limited funds, and we've had some big donations in the past, but unfortunately those are drying up, so we're starting to have to make hard decisions on not covering our volunteers costs to represent us at some of the conferences.

Once 2024 ends, we will publish a detailed financial blog post, outlining our expenses this past year, but we'd love help from readers and users like you!

What's Needed

More hosting is always appreciated. We get by nearly entirely from free hosting and can't thank our sponsors such as OSUOSL and Leaseweb enough, but can always use more diversity.
We always need volunteers to work on stuff! Social Media and someone to manage our store are two that come to mind, but platform-specific development experience (e.g. Android) is always good.
Sponsorship! if you think you have a good fit for a sponsor who aligns with our interests, please, reach out!
If you have any corporate matching, Kodi is registered as a corporate nonprofit beneficiary with the Benevity platform.
And lastly, monetary donations go a long way too. As stated, we are a 501(c)(3), so these donations are tax deductible in the US. If you have a few dollars, pounds, euros or equivalent going spare, you can really help us out. Thank you!

We always want to keep some money in the bank, and we have a rule: we need to be able to cover the next Devcon before we hold this one and, unfortunately, 2025 may be the last year for a couple years at the current rate of donations. We spend less than US$30k for the entire event, including flying our team from around the world to attend plus all hotel/food/conference room costs, but our current finances just won't support this after next year's conference unless something changes, such as a new sponsor (or the RPi5 case becomes exceedingly popular and sells out!).

Thank you very much in advance for anything you can do to help.

-- Team Kodi

Flirc Case for Raspberry Pi 5 - Kodi Edition

Team Flirc — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 11:14:39 GMT

Team Flirc and Team Kodi are thrilled to introduce the newly designed Flirc Raspberry Pi 5 Case, Kodi Edition. Available now!

Our journey began with a host of ideas that we transformed into a crowdsourcing poll on the Kodi forums. The community chose from six designs, and we loved seeing your preferences and hearing your feedback. We’re excited to continue this collaborative approach because, just as Kodi is community-driven, so should its official case be.

With only about 2,000 cases available, this is a truly limited edition. Once sold out, we won’t produce more. Instead, every quarter, we’ll engage with the community again, allowing you to submit and vote on new ideas for another limited run.

With each purchase, you’re helping fund the Kodi team’s ongoing development and innovation.

On top of our Black Friday - Cyber Monday deals, enjoy an extra 10-15% off when you purchase a Kodi Edition Raspberry Pi 5 case, which can be used on our Flirc USB or Skip 1s Universal Remote.

If you want to see more, check out the YouTube video below, or just skip the line and head straight over to the Flirc store to grab one!

A heartfelt thanks to the Kodi Team, our loyal customers, community members, and everyone who contributed to the design.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Kodi 21.1 "Omega" - Release

Team Kodi — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 11:51:22 GMT

Okay, a late announcement - apologies, you can blame the summer holiday season. Or, if it's easier, you can just blame me as the bloke with the keyboard, that works equally well. Either way, many of you will already have noticed this, but, in case you haven't ...

Team Kodi is here with the first point release of the 21.x "Omega" series.

A range of bugfixes have been collected since the original release of Omega 21.0. Rather than list them all here, you can see the full changelog on Github, as usual.

We always want to thank everyone who has helped us track down and fix any issues. We endeavour to minimise the issues everyone experiences, but with such a large project, and the fact everyone contributing to Kodi is a volunteer, issues and bugs are a part of life. If you happen to experience any bugs/issues, don't hesitate to reach out on the forums, or raise an issue on Github.

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 21.0 installation - indeed, this will happen, and probably already has happened, 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.

Android Deployment

We always do what's known as a "staged" deployment roll out for Android. So if you didn't receive the update immediately, it should have come through over the following week or so, and rollout should now be complete.

Names Have Power

Prof Yaffle — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 12:52:30 GMT

This is a little later in the development cycle than would normally be the case, but I'm sure you'll understand why.

It's traditional, as we move towards the release of a new version of Kodi, to begin the process of naming what will become its successor. In recent years, "Leia" gave way to "Matrix", which moved aside for "Nexus", and then on to our current version, "Omega". There's a clue there to the pattern, so P-something it is.

Our normal process would be to ask the forums and team for suggestions, edit these down to a shortlist, and then run an internal poll and choose a winner. However, the shortlisting was done a little quickly this time, and we ended up picking a P-name that was already in use for a problematic add-on (arrr, shiver me timbers, and all that - absolutely not a connection we'd wish to make). The obvious solution was to skip that one, then, and move to the second choice - except that turned out to be the name of a legitimate streaming service. And the third? Another problematic add-on.

As the team deliberated the need for another poll, we heard sad news about a colleague and team member whose contributions to Kodi have been so immensely valuable. His death at such a young age gave everyone pause, and with his name just-so-happening to begin with exactly the right letter, it seemed fitting to mark his passing with more than just a blog post.

So with muted fanfare, we memorialise our good friend, and continue development towards Kodi v22, "Piers".

You will, of course, hear more about this as the development branch takes shape, and you can follow development on GitHub as you wish.

A Tribute to Estuary Developer and Kodi Team Member, Piers

Natethomas — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 18:25:04 GMT

In 2015, Kodi’s default theme Confluence was growing long in the tooth. Most of the really exciting skins from that time accomplished far more, and Confluence was ultimately a 2009 update to an existing skin called MediaStream that was itself several years old. It was time for Confluence to retire. We needed something new that adhered to the UX best practices of the time.

I proposed some wireframes based on Google’s Material Design that were pretty vague, but I hoped would be enough to get us started. Almost immediately, members of our team of skilled skinners (Phil65 and Piers) jumped on the task. I made my initial suggestion early on the 17th of June, and Piers had already mocked up a complete home page later that day. His post at that time introducing the mockup had me chuckling for days. Once an idea struck him, the guy worked tirelessly to see it through.

By the 18th, a day later, Piers’ mockup was revamped and looked remarkably complete. Unfortunately, those early designs have been lost to the internet gods, but we do still have a screenshot of the first alpha created in August that remained quite true to those early mockups.

By September, Estuary was pretty well complete with two primary themes, the 3D-styled curial and the flat style which remains the default to this day. Piers and Phil65, along with several other skinners, notably BigNoid, had introduced a variety of features including the ability to select different color styles, like pink. The team also created a separate second skin designed specifically to work for mobile devices.

In 2016, these skins were officially released with Kodi 17 to universal praise within the community (for those interested in history, you can find the original blog post here). The work done by Piers and the team on UX/UI in 2015 and 2016 cannot be understated. They developed a lasting and original skin that remains in use to this very day.

We recently learned that Piers passed away. He was 37. He will be missed by those of us who worked with him on this project. We cannot emphasize enough his contribution to software seen and used by millions of people worldwide.

Thank you for everything, Piers.

The Sun Sets on Python 2

Team Kodi — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 17:56:40 GMT

Recently, Team Kodi proudly released Kodi v21 "Omega", the latest major release of our popular media centre software.

Our longevity and popularity means that Kodi is installed on literally millions of devices worldwide. For a range of reasons, not all of them are capable of supporting the newer releases; we do, however, try to maintain as much support as we can for the older releases, with our target being support for the previous two versions before the current one. The release of Omega thus moves Kodi Leia out of active support.

The final version of Kodi Leia (v18.9) was released in October 2020. Leia was also noteworthy as being the final version which made use of the Python 2 language, with Kodi Matrix and beyond using the newer Python 3. That move was made due to Python 2 being marked as end-of-life on 1st January 2020 by its authors, who now no longer support it and so it does not receive any updates or security patches. Python 3 is fully supported and updated, but Python 3 code is not directly compatible with Python 2.

This means that, as Kodi Leia moves out of support, so does Python 2 for Kodi. As a result, we will no longer be accepting any updates for Python 2 addons into our repository, and the Leia repo will be frozen. Any Leia installation will still be able to access the repo, but addon updates will only be accepted in Python 3, with the effect that they can only be run on Kodi Matrix or later. This will free up the Team Kodi volunteers who review addon submissions to focus entirely on Python 3 addons, making reviews simpler and faster and so minimising the delays between submission and release of acceptable addons into the repo.

This also means that older scrapers written in XML or Python 2 will not get any updates, so any changes made on the source database sites which break them will render them permanently broken. Most of these scrapers are long unsupported anyway, but as Leia and older versions are now end-of-life then the only solution will be to update to a newer version of Kodi using the supported Python 3 scrapers.

We thus bid a grateful farewell to Python 2, and put our focus now on updating and improving Kodi for the future.

Kodi 21.0 "Omega" - Release

Team Kodi — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 16:13:41 GMT

It's time! We are very pleased to present the latest and greatest release of Kodi, v21.0 "Omega".

With this release we have seen over 3,750 commits since v20.0 "Nexus" was available to the world on January 15th, 2023. As always, this has been a huge effort from many contributors, testers and supporters. Thanks go out to our team members, plus everyone in our community who sent in a pull request, tested and gave feedback, or provided support to users on the forum. We always appreciate your contribution to making Kodi better.

Let's review some of the changes you can expect:

Major Features

FFmpeg 6

Kodi relies significantly on FFmpeg to do a lot of heavy lifting for us. Many developers have contributed to upgrading the project to make use of the newer FFmpeg releases over the past 15 months, initially starting with targeting FFmpeg 5, but later updating to FFmpeg 6. We are always greatly appreciative of the work of all of the Open Source software projects that we rely on to bring you Kodi.

DolbyVision On-the-Fly Profile Conversion

For our Android users, a fantastic contribution from quietvoid allows users to convert some less well-supported DV profile types to more well-supported profiles.

macOS Now Uses "Native" Windowing

Another change that has been years in the making. This was started by some amazing developers many years ago, and we have now been able to finally remove the last remnants of SDL library usage in Kodi. We now use native implementations for window displays on the Apple macOS platform.

A New Platform: webOS

A new platform can now run Kodi natively: a port to LG webOS TVs has been worked out by some amazing developers who have reverse engineered huge amounts of the webOS media pipelines. One of our newest team members, sundermann, has helped shepherd our newest supported platform, to extend the reach of Kodi to even more devices.

In-game Player Viewer

Controller configuration for games gets a little better in v21: a window has been added in-game to view which game port each player's controller is currently connected to.

Behind the Scenes

A large 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 Omega Alpha to RC2 release announcements and review the GitHub changelog here.

Time doesn't stand still, and we have already branched Kodi v22 "P*" for development. 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. Your donations are greatly appreciated and help us to function, 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 21.0 "Omega" 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.

If you are an Android user and wish to update to Kodi 21.0 as soon as possible, you can either sideload, or join the Google Play - Kodi testing track which will get the release submitted more quickly. The "open" release will be promoted from the testing track in a week or two. We strongly advise Android users who use alternative skins to follow up with their skin developer, or to disable auto update before this time period, as not every skin will yet have been updated.

Over a Year Late, A Dollar Short - More Than Two Decades of Kodi!

Keith Herrington — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 17:13:57 GMT

Hi, everyone - I'm Keith, and while I now find myself President of the Kodi Foundation, my initial involvement with Kodi goes way back, as a humble user. Since our 20th anniversary came and went, I've been meaning to write a bit of a look back on how we got here - how I got here. This is the story of my - and the project's - journey.

In the Beginning...

In 2002, a couple guys saw the potential of being able to watch media on their own terms, through what was a new type of device: a "connected" TV device. They wanted to bring many things you'd traditionally need a computer for to the living room, operating it from the couch without needing a keyboard or mouse, controlling events through what they called a 10 foot interface because, well, it was an interface you could sit 10 feet away from.

While special-purpose devices already existed, they usually were things like DVD players, and they weren't "connected" to anything else or even had the ability to hook up to a network. Indeed, even the TiVo, one of the most impressive devices of the time, lacked an Ethernet port. One of the creators of Samba, an open-source interoperability application to share files between Linux and Windows, eventually figured out how to add a network port to a TiVo; however, even though it was the first mass marketed consumer Linux-based appliance, it was still very much a closed, walled garden.

The Xbox changed all that. In 2001, Microsoft released their first console, leveraging their work on x86 platforms to build out a version of Windows specialized for running games. The familiarity allowed game developers to easily port to the new gaming console; the fact that Microsoft sold them at a loss, knowing they would make it back in game sales, ensured rapid consumer adoption. Luckily for the hackers out there, there were more similarities than differences when compared to something they were already very familiar with: the standard Windows personal computer. Very quickly, folks like Bunnie figured out ways around the security, achieving the holy grail in record time for a console: the ability to run untrusted code.

Long before we had the Raspberry Pi, OpenWrt routers and other tinkerer's dream "open" environments, Xbox hacking quickly became the fastest route to general-purpose, connected computing. The availability of powerful, affordable, standardized hardware enabled an entire community of hackers wanting to break out of Microsoft's walled garden and run whatever code they wanted on their Xbox. Emulation, or the ability to trick old games such as NES and Sega Genesis into believing the Xbox is the same hardware, was one of the first big use cases, since we now had something powerful enough that hooked up to a regular TV and offered a standard controller.

XBMC is Born

While many folk worked on getting Linux and various other things running, the project that attracted me the most was Xbox Media Player. This brought the ability to play compressed media to the Xbox: up until this point, only a computer could play these files, and if you were one of the those super early adopters who had network cables strung across your house, you could now even stream it over the network or the Internet (which was definitely not fast enough for video… yet!).

XBMP came out in 2002 as the convergence of two separate closed source apps natively written with the Microsoft Xbox Development Kit by d7o3g4q (a.k.a. duo) and RUNTiME. As many at the time pointed out, since it was leveraging GPL code, it likely needed to be open source. At the same time, another developer - Frodo - had created YAMP as "Yet Another Media Player"; when these projects also converged at the end of 2002, Xbox Media Center, or XBMC, was born. While the initial beta was closed source, the developers quickly open sourced it and it's been open source ever since.

XBMC v2, released September 2006

(You can even have a read of the original manual if you like!)

I was a dedicated Xbox user at the time, for everything besides gaming. I diligently connected to #xbins on EFnet to find the latest binary release and watched in awe the quick iteration these folks were doing, adding so many incredible features, even supporting things like CD+G for Karaoke. You have to realise how groundbreaking a library mode was, allowing you to peruse your stored media collection while everyone else - even Netflix - was still renting DVDs by post or picking them up in strip mall stores.

The developers themselves deserve a ton of recognition: their tireless pursuit of the best media experience, one that was infinitely customizable and powerful and something they were proud of. While most have moved on to other things, a few, like spiff, remain around since those early days, and are still here to let others know why certain things are why they are and even to still occasionally contribute code.

Success Has Many Parents

But these folks did not do this in a vacuum: as the saying goes, "it takes a village". FFmpeg, for example, being the Internet's Swiss Army knife for video, handles so much of the core rendering and playback. In developer parlance, we call these 'dependencies' but I prefer to think of these types of libraries as the backbone. Without the ability to stand on the shoulder of these mammoth libraries, XBMC devs would never have been able to focus so much on the skinning and user experience. While XBMC was initially heavily based on mplayer, which is now known as mpv, it has evolved into being closely tied to FFmpeg.

XBMC v9 "Babylon", released May 2009

There are also countless other contributors - to the code, artwork, forum, and beyond - who absolutely have to be acknowledged. It's been a long journey from those early applications thru XBMP and XBMC to today's Kodi, but it's clear that the application wouldn't be what it is without the add-on ecosystem, translators, community moderators, volunteer artists, system admins, database admins, and many more.

And while devs have came and gone, the project has lived on, continuing to expand to every major platform it possibly can, even to a couple of smart TVs now. Highly unusual - maybe unique - as an open-source application that started on a Microsoft product before spreading further to so many other, disparate platforms, Kodi has now even come full circle to be back in the Xbox Store (although, somewhat ironically, Microsoft platforms have become increasingly challenging for us because we lack current developer knowledge). We still try to bring all the functionality we can to every platform we can: you've got a weird mod file, from your demoscene days? Still got a pile of FLVs? We got you. What about wanting to stream Widevine-enabled Internet content with an open-source project? Yeah, we see you and we care.

So, Here We Are

One of the parts that some don't realize is since our initial development, we've always been a monolithic application, meaning the entire codebase must be ported to the desired platform. I've said we're the "largest open-source multimedia project" for years, half-jokingly, but I mean this by the literal lines of code that it takes to run it.

XBMC v10 "Dharma", released December 2010

And we've stayed volunteer. As a consumer-oriented open-source project, no company has ever sponsored more than a port or a feature; indeed, since the nonprofit foundation behind it isn't setup to be engaged, at worst companies have simply given some money to an individual to work on a feature. Even this is definitely not the norm: 99.9% of Kodi has been built out of passion and love for multimedia and the desire to have an open-source platform for which people can decide the look and feel and customize to their liking, in both hardware and software terms.

I do have to call out our longest and biggest sponsor and partner, Flirc: their support with this project has been unwavering.

This is truly software on your own terms, and to me, is the essence of open source.

Wrapping it All Up

Sorry this became so wordy, but I've been wanting to write a "20 year blog post" for so long, and it's now been nearly 22 years since XBMP binaries first became available. Time flies. I hope this blog helped you stop for a moment and marvel at how far we've come, even if you've only been a user since we've been called Kodi: the developers see themselves in you and you're the reason why we've kept hacking on this project for so long.

So, let's raise our glasses for over 20 years, and, yes, we still have MANY lines of original, first generation code! We have to thank everyone who's been involved and supported us: everyone who submitted a pull request or posted a message on the forum, all the devs who have tirelessly worked on the 'dependency' libraries that mean so much to us, and especially the official Team XBMC and Kodi Foundation developers. You folks, who continue to iterate, tweak and build the future of this platform, enable millions to consume media without having to care about how it works and why.

XBMC v13 "Gotham", released May 2014

And while you're here, we made a T-shirt to commemorate this moment! It (hopefully) has every team member on it. As we said, we're volunteers, and the only money our non-profit receives is thru donations, merchandise and the only licensed product we’ve ever been a part of, Flirc's Kodi Raspberry Pi case.

Take your pick from a dark T-shirt, a light T-shirt, a pillow or something else from the whole store.

Please, purchase something, and help us to keep thriving for the next 20 years; I personally plan our Devcons, and we might not be able to get together in 2025 without help from people like you, so anything you can do to help, we really appreciate it.

Oh, and while I'm asking: if anyone knows any non profit open source lawyers that are prepared to help us with things like trademark registration and maintenance of the Foundation, please send them our way! Legal-at-kodi-dot-tv.

Thanks again. I have no idea what the next 20 years will bring, or whether I will personally still be involved, but, for as long as developers and users are still interested, I know we'll all try our best to support it.

Keith Herrington
President, Kodi Foundation

(There's some further history here and here, if you're interested).

Ubuntu Team-Kodi PPA Officially Retired

Team Kodi — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 18:20:38 GMT

The Team Kodi PPA has long been a staple for Ubuntu (and similar) users wishing to use more recent, and less adulterated, versions of Kodi.

It is with sadness that the team has come to a decision to officially retire the PPA due to the overhead of maintaining it.

We want to express our sincere thanks to wsnipex for maintaining it for so many years, tirelessly making it available to countless users in the pursuit of making Kodi more easily accessible for the masses on many of the more popular Linux distributions.

The Linux world is shifting slowly to packaged deployments and containers, and so, going forward, the team is looking to utilise Flatpak to hopefully give Linux users a similar, but more maintainable, "pure" Kodi application. We believe this will also allow us to provide greater access from more distributions than the PPA was ever able to.

We have a considerable amount of work to get the Flatpak builds up to the level the PPA provided (stable, nightlies, etc.), so things will develop over time. In the meantime, then, we will be looking to make this more obvious as an installation method, and update our documentation accordingly to allow users to install and use Flatpak builds more easily. You can, of course, still build from source if you'd prefer (just as people do on many other distros); whatever route you choose, we'd appreciate your feedback to help us improve the process, document the steps, and generally make things as easy as we can for our users.

DevCon 2024 - Budapest - Part III

Prof Yaffle — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 17:29:25 GMT

Time flies, and we're already at the third and final day of DevCon 2024. We'll be losing people today as they head home, which will shorten events; additionally, most of the day is scheduled for the inevitable people-sitting-together-and-hacking-code later today, which will also eat into time, so this will inevitably be a short post.

Random, spontaneous, unstructured conversations about mirrors, more about release cycles, about merging. A wild conversation about a potential third-party conference in south Asia, and how any of us would physically get there anyway, given that some of our members don't fly for climate reasons (and we can't afford it anyway). Various debates about the DVB specification, EITs and embedded EPG data in different countries/formats around the planet. Much about IPTV, metadata, scrapers, servers and cloud services, a chunk on permission cleanup and retired team members, some cosmetic website changes, debates about skins and the out-of-the-box experience when installing Kodi for the first time, and general chat about all things AV-related.

After a good chunk of reminiscing about events and team members past, we ended the conference with a bit of a reflection on DevCon itself - the format, the location, accessibility, what we've done while we're here. If we're to do this again - and we certainly want to - then we need to find ways of maximising the value and minimising the cost.

Team Kodi (plus guest), DevCon 2024

So, that's it: as suitcases are already trundling into the distance, DevCon 2024 draws to a close. Thanks for following along, we hope that you've found these posts informative, and eternal thanks for continuing to support Kodi.

-- Team Kodi.

DevCon 2024 - Budapest - Part II

Prof Yaffle — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:55:04 GMT

Good morning, dear reader (okay, "readers" - I'll be generous, and assume there's more than one of you!). It's a beautiful day, the skies are an endless sea of blue, the forecast is a congenial 20℃ spring day - and we're back in a sealed room, and ready to get going with Day Two of this year's DevCon.

First up, romanvm, with a talk on computer text encoding - not necessarily Kodi-specific, but something that affects so many applications, particularly when using non-Latin scripts. Fundamentally, all text is abstract, and we simply need an agreed way to represent some symbols in a binary form so they can be stored, manipulated, and retrieved as needed - from 7-bit ASCII to 8-bit national extensions to today's 16- and 32-bit Unicode with UTF-8 providing variable-length encoding. This presents specific challenges for specific languages, as you need to know the size (number of bytes) for some languages and how e.g. concatenation would work in others.

Next, fuzzard led a discussion about our next release, version 22, Kodi P*: finalise a name, artwork, timescales, and similar. This segued into a broader conversation, co-led by martijn, about our approach to release management and versioning in general: when to merge stuff (do it earlier), the overall process (documentation, ownership, participants, responsibilities), schedules, impact on our users, what even constitutes a new version. Should we offer a stable release monthly, quarterly, annually? How do other projects do it, and what can we learn? Given that we're not other projects, though, what are the implications for skins, databases, addons, users? And, anyway, could we require volunteers to work in their spare time to rigid deadlines: who wants to volunteer to be managed that tightly, when it's supposed to be fun?

We then moved to some quick, impromptu, more free-format discussions: yol with infrastructure - what's physical, what's hosted, what's cloud-based, AWS vs Azure vs OSUOSL vs stuff-under-a-desk; keithah with the ongoing implications of content protection; yol again about mirrors and approaches we've had from different potential non-standard hosts.

Continuing the quick-fire round, Prof Yaffle took a turn to stir a conversation about futures and how we respond to the ever-changing landscape - the art of the possible. What could we consider: streaming to Kodi, transcoding, content aggregation, Chromecast/Airplay support, headless Kodi (still!), thin client player, Ambilight...

Similarly, phunkyfish and fuzzard kicked off a discussion about increased automation of branching and building of binary add-ons, particularly when building a new major release (which links back to our approach to release management and versioning, above).

After a break for lunch (and a team photo), we continued with the short topics with multiple participants: release manager permissions; guidelines on team membership, permission, expiration, etc.; sponsorship levels. We then moved to a more in-depth conversation kicked off by Prof Yaffle about distributing Kodi on Linux, and the industry move more towards containers instead of repositories (e.g. PPAs): the implications for addons, documentation, user experience, configuration, and so on.

sundermann took the microphone next to talk about the current state of the webOS port: implications of having a limited set of addons built and bundled, webOS store status and submission challenges, remaining playback issues, SSL certification, installation process.

Next to take the floor, chewitt, with an update on LibreELEC. Overall user numbers have declined since the original separation from OpenELEC - an artefact of people moving to different platforms over time, perhaps, such as Chromecasts and Fire Sticks, which are good enough for very many uses - although there's still a large, active installed base of mostly Pi (mostly 3, 4 and even 5) systems, with some platforms still growing. He explored the status of different platforms - Pi, generic, various legacy platforms, GPU variations (and thus driver challenges) that are out in the wild. Financially, LibreELEC remains solvent with donations via Open Collective, and he talked a little about their experience of that platform versus PayPal and similar. Finally, a quick update on hosting - what's where, mirrors, status, plans - and some improvements that have been made to e.g. CI/CD tools.

Without pausing for breath, chewitt then moved on to Tvheadend, as a part of the LibreELEC/Kodi "ecosystem" that needed some assistance: it's a very-widely used PVR backend for Kodi users, and it had fallen into disrepair as maintainers had come and gone. So, working alongside our special guest at this DevCon, Flole998 (who became the de facto maintainer of the project after a "field promotion"), Prof Yaffle (artisan blogger of this parish) and some genuinely-keen new contributors (you know who you are), he's been working to refresh the forum and website and work towards getting a new release, updated documentation, and generally-invigorated life signs.

A quick dash for dinner, and we're back to finish up for today, starting the last tranche of topics with phunkyfish to talk about catchup and timeshift for video add-ons. This is all about bringing consistency to how you can pause and navigate various video feeds: local, streaming/IPTV, or even OTA via a PVR add-on. In effect, we can bring all sources into a consistent "channel list", with subtle differences based on what's available (e.g. previous/next) but as much common look, feel and behaviour as possible (OSD, pause, stop, what else is on/EPG): local media is fully navigable, streaming might have a 7- or 21-day catchup, dependent on provider, and true live TV simply appears in the traditional linear fashion.

Bringing the day to a close, then, we moved to sports features in Kodi, led by zag (who, incidentally, runs TheAudioDB and TheSportsDB websites): Sports view, metadata for events from TheSportsDB site via a new Python scraper (thumbnail, artwork, description - just as you'd expect). Future concepts include timestamps for significant events (yellow cards/penalties, scoring events, and similar), team lineups (aka the "cast" of the programme), event databases; outside the core concept, we have the possibility of screensavers with scores or schedules, or perhaps Kodi notifications when, say, your team scores while you're strong-armed into watching something else.

And that's it for Day Two. A few more topics to roll over until tomorrow, along with some spontaneous coding while everyone is together - but, until then, that's it for now.

PS it rained later, just as we went out. Boo.

DevCon 2024 - Budapest - Part I

Prof Yaffle — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 21:32:29 GMT

The lights are dimmed, the projector is running, the microphones are tested, the coffee is on... yes, it's time for Kodi's DevCon once again! We're coming to you from beautiful Budapest, the grand capital of Hungary - which last hosted us eight years ago, and it's genuinely great to be back. With two thousand years of history, stretching from Celtic origins by way of Romans and Mongols and the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, modern Budapest is today a global city with vibrant finance, media, fashion, technology, and entertainment sectors. If you know nothing about Hungary, I promise you that you've seen this city and the surrounding countryside in more films and television shows than you realise.

This year, we're going to go back to the "daily blog" format we've used previously, so let's see how this works. So, with no further ado bar a quick drum roll... off we go with Day One: a later start and a slightly reduced agenda for this session to allow extra time for people to get here and settle in.

We opened with welcoming comments from keithah, looking back at what is now 22 years of XBMC/Kodi and not quite-so-many years of DevCons. It's always interesting to see how many faces have stuck around, year after year - how many have faded away - and how some have returned , sometimes after a long absence.

keithah continued with a dive into the Foundation's finances and related aspects of managing the Foundation. We've never been a wealthy project - that's not why we do this, after all - and we've always been cautious about e.g. advertising and headline sponsors. We remain solvent, and can invest in development hardware, server infrastructure and, yes, this conference, but we do need to generate new and more regular income to make sure that remains the case.

Beyond money, we're in search of a new non-profit lawyer to help us with e.g. trademark registration and protection, as our current one is retiring. If that sounds like you, or someone you know is a believer in FOSS and prepared to work on a no-fee/low-fee basis, please get in touch and let us know, as this is an area we've been struggling with.

Another area in which we've been challenged is banking. As a US-registered non-profit, we're not eligible to open a European bank account, and that causes problems because we lack an IBAN (primarily for payments in). We did have an account with Wise, which solved the problem entirely, but that was unfortunately closed without explanation or notice. We continue to look for an answer to this that doesn't involve setting up and maintaining an EU subsidiary.

zag then took the floor to provide a view of Kodi from an end-user perspective: what could be better, how Kodi is positioned against similar products in a changing landscape (e.g. updating and cleaning the library versus making it transparent, accessing live/IPTV, podcasts, new user experience/setup wizards and general configuration, etc.). Good discussion about what might be, what could be, what we can think further on.

Finally for today, garbear talked about OpenGL in RetroPlayer - a key component to improving support for later-generation 3D games. This has a long history within Kodi, with multiple contributing branches stretching back perhaps six or more years (with Retroplayer going back even further). There are still problems to be resolved, so work is ongoing, but the list is getting shorter as progress is made, and plans are in place to get this over the line.

And that's it. Other than the obligatory round of introductions, who-are-you-agains and oh-so-that's-yous, it's just about 22:00 and time to call it an evening. See you all when the planet turns a little further.

Kodi 21.0 "Omega" RC1

Team Kodi — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 09:42:25 GMT

Can you feel the excitement building in the air? Well, you should, as we are ready for our first Release Candidate for Kodi 21.0 "Omega"!

This is a major release, so, as you'd expect, it comes with many new features. However, with a core change to FFmpeg 6.0, there is a very good chance that we'll get some regressions As such, please be aware that installing this will most likely break things, and we'd really like your help at that point to identify the problems and get them fixed. Please raise Github issues with full debug logs to help us resolve any issues that you wonderful testers come across.

First, we'd like to make a few targeted announcements.

Android users

Many users may still be on the Kodi testing track for their Android devices. It's far easier to leave the testing track from a 'phone-based device, but be aware that if your device is on the testing track, we will be continuing to deploy Beta 3 releases over the next week or so. If you wish to opt out of the testing group, one way you can is by visiting the following link Google Play - Kodi testing track. From here, you can opt out for your Google Play account. This is the best (and possibly only) way to opt out on many Android TV devices (e.g. Nvidia Shields).

With that said, for those adventurous types who would like to help us with testing, you can use the same link to opt in for a Google Play account.

Xbox users

As we do not have a testing track available for Xbox users, we will continue our customary deployment of RC1+ of our major releases to the Microsoft App store. This means that Xbox users will start to see their Nexus deployments updated to Omega RC1.

If you do not wish to receive this update, the only option we are aware of is for you to disable auto updates for all apps/games on your Xbox.

You can disable auto updates to games and apps in the Microsoft Store through the Store's settings.
- Select the Start screen, then select Microsoft Store.
- In Microsoft Store at the upper right, select the account menu (the three dots) and then select Settings.
- Under App updates, set Update apps automatically to Off.

The UWP store deployment is scheduled to begin rolling out on the 16th March.

Skin Developers

An API bump has been made for Kodi 21's testing cycle. See the following PRs for details:

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23926

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23862

This will require changes and submissions to the Omega branch for skins for those who submit to the Kodi Repository. Reach out on the forums if you have any questions/concerns.

Please note, https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23927 was merged shortly after Beta 2, and all skins will need to update the GUI version number to be available in Omega repos for any builds (including nightlies) after Beta 2.

The following forum thread has the skinning change info for Omega: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=372280&pid=3174566#pid3174566.

And now, for the list of changes for RC 1.

Estuary

A consistency fix was made by @Hitcher to make OSD controls for some buttons to just be disabled, rather than hidden, so the buttons stay shown in a consistent manner.

Filesystem

A partial revert has been made that fixes some binary addons being unable to correctly parse some XML files.

General

@ksooo continues to clean up things related to the Video Version feature. This time he has fixed a media name label that would be blank under certain circumstances.
A first time contributor, @hagaygo, has made a fix to allow users to set a subtitle save path rather than using a temp location under some circumstances.
@CrystalP submitted two fixes that fix list locations after adding/removing versions/extras and their art related management.

Music

audiobooks were showing their last chapter with no duration; this has been fixed by @the-black-eagle.

Platform Specifics

Android:
- Cleanups to build/package files have been made by @joseluismarti. This helps get the codebase nice and clean for the newer Android SDKs leading into the future, meaning we can more easily backport to Omega when we are making changes for v22 "P" in the future.
- @thexai has made a change that allows subtitles to be tonemapped to avoid extreme brightness for HDR playback.
Linux:
- @fritsch, our resident audio expert, has submitted a change to allow Pipewire to properly identify HDMI for passthrough usage.
macOS:
- @enen92 has implemented Hotkeycontroller for media keys on macOS. This allows Kodi to more accurately capture and handle media-related keys and allows us to play more nicely with other running apps on a system expecting to use the same media keys.
Windows:
- @thexai has submitted some colour accuracy changes for 10bit SDR/HDR colour mapping.

PVR

A fix for icons not being correctly refreshed was made by @ksooo.

VideoPlayer

@popcornmix has tracked down a variable initialisation bug that helps to reduce video stalls under certain conditions.
A fix that stops incorrect refresh rate changes occurring for interlaced content in some circumstances was submitted by @CrystalP.

Known Issues

You can see open issues on our tracker at https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues. However, to call out a couple of specifics, please be aware of the following if you're planning on upgrading:

There are seek issues with multi-part MP4 files on Android (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/23673).
We've had reports that the new splash screen looks like an OpenGL corruption; we know, it's not a problem, so don't panic. We'd be happy to have your artwork contributions if you'd like to work on an alternative.
If remote sources are unavailable at startup, users are seeing significant delays while waiting (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/23958).

We continue to march forward to what we hope will be a successful v21 "Omega" release.

If you love to live on the bleeding edge, you can get RC 1 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.

There is always a great deal more changes/fixes/updates than we can highlight in these reports, so, as usual, you can see a fuller list of what has been merged between v21 and v20 here. For a more targeted look at the changes made since v21 Beta 3, you can see those changes here.

Kodi 20.5 "Nexus" - Release

Team Kodi — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 10:05:10 GMT

Nexus just won't end, it seems: we're back already, this time what we hope will be the final release for the Nexus line. Welcome to 20.5!

An assortment of bug fixes, some backports, no real new features. Full changelog since 20.4 on Github, as usual.

Release notes

Input

Reverted a number of controller changes that caused massive failures on Android devices. Input handling will now be the same as what was available in 20.3.

Platform Specific

Android
- Some great detective work was done by @spdfrk for a fix that meant Kodi would close the app during potential colour mode changes.
- A backport by @fritsch that intends to bring Nexus inline with Omega behaviour for AudioTrack on Android. This means that some device users will need to add an extra setting to their AdvancedSettings.xml file. Details can be seen at https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24729.
Linux
- Branding colours have been added to the metainfo file so that they can be used by things like the Flathub store. Info about this can be seen at the Flathub blog post https://docs.flathub.org/blog/introducing-app-brand-colors/.
iOS/tvOS
- A change that wasn't actually in Kodi's codebase, but a fix nonetheless, means that the inputstream.ffmpegdirect addon is now available to the iOS/tvOS release debs.

... plus, of course, some behind-the-scenes fixes and updates for e.g. library versions.

Thanks, as always, to everyone who has helped us track down and fix any issues. We endeavour to minimise the issues everyone experiences, but with such a large project, and the fact everyone contributing to Kodi is a volunteer, issues and bugs are a part of life. if you happen to experience any bugs/issues, don't hesitate to reach out on the forums, or raise an issue on Github.

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 20.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 v20 itself, or of previous versions, you can find the corresponding articles in the relevant blog posts.

Android Deployment

We always do what's known as a "staged" deployment roll out for Android. So if you don't receive the update immediately, be patient, as it will come through over the next week. As the majority of fixes are related to Android Playstore deployment, we will be cautious with the deployment time. If you do receive 20.5 and have any issues with the Playstore deployment, please let us know as soon as possible.

Kodi 21.0 "Omega" Beta 3

Team Kodi — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 09:39:24 GMT

Editorial note: this blog post has been delayed for technical reasons, so the release is already available.

Time marches on for Kodi 21 "Omega", we are here with the third Beta release!

This is a major release, so, as you'd expect, it comes with many new features. However, with a core change to FFmpeg 6.0, there is a very good chance that some regressions may occur. As such, please be aware that installing this will most likely break things, and we'd really like your help at that point to identify the problems and get them fixed. Please raise Github issues with full debug logs to help us resolve any issues you wonderful testers come across.

First, we'd like to make a few targeted announcements.

Android users

With that said, for those adventurous types who would like to help us with testing, you can use the same link to opt in for a Google Play account.

Skin Developers

An API bump has been made for Kodi 21's testing cycle. See the following PRs for details:

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23926

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23862

This will require changes and submissions to the Omega branch for skins for those who submit to the Kodi repository. Reach out on the forums if you have any questions/concerns.

Please note, https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23927 has been merged shortly after Beta 2, and all skins will need to update the GUI version number to be available in Omega repos for any builds (including nightlies) after Beta 2.

The following forum thread has the skinning change info for Omega: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=372280&pid=3174566#pid3174566

And now, for the list of changes for Beta 3.

Build/Dependencies

Support for building with swig 4.2.0

General

The way in which buffer fill was handled was changed to care more for low-power CPU devices. Under certain circumstances, and with especially high manually-configured readbuffer factors, the buffer filling thread caused high CPU usage and introduced stutter by itself.
Implemented a new "Adaptive" setting in Services / Caching / Read Factor that implements a variable read factor based on cache level. This means that the cache fills faster, while at the same time using a less-aggressive read factor when the cache is already full.
Fixed media served through plugins not being accessible when a master lock is used.

JSON-RPC

Add command to change playback speed (tempo).
Add a command to activate screen saver.

Music

Fix an issue with m3u playlists which didn't show art for the second and subsequent tracks: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24675.
Allow navigation from artists directly to songs, missing out albums and discs. This is more like how Spotify et al. navigate: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24649, forum thread https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=375313.
Only drop music database triggers on clean if they exist, which fixes a problem that occurred if Kodi was closed/crashed whilst a clean was underway on the Music database.

Platform Specifics

Android:
- The audio changes for the Android ecosystem were documented in https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=376161.
- Due to various firmware bugs on multiple devices we were forced to add some opt-in audio settings for (especially) the widely-used FireTV Cube 3rd Gen, which were enabled by default until this beta, but sadly regressed on half-broken firmwares of other devices. It's not possible to maintain a deny list as available systems and versions change too quickly, plus Kodi release cycles can't be synchronised with every big vendor putting out fixes. As such, we decided to move this into an advanced setting, with more information available in the linked forum thread. Feel free to open new issues if you see regressions of some sort, but please don't forget your debug log, as help isn't possible otherwise due to the sheer variety of differently-broken boxes.
- Another advanced setting now allows the output of high-precision 32-bit float from within Kodi for multi-channel PCM files. This is again an advanced setting because some devices fail silently when opening this combination. Float32 is the highest precision Android's Audiotrack Soundserver can handle. It was tested and is working on Shield and FireTV 4K 2nd Gen.
- We received a whole lot of bug fixes from external contributors this time, with the focus on HDMI Hotplug after refresh rate changes and also Audio device enumeration. The long-standing bug of losing Android IEC devices during IDLE is solved. We are very thankful for these contributions.
- @quietvoid has implemented a new setting in Player / Processing that allows filtering of HDR dynamic metadata HDR10+ and/or Dolby Vision to improve compatibility on devices that had issues, especially with hybrid videos that includes both types at same time.
iOS/tvOS
- Disable VTB (hardware decoding) for real-time interlaced videos.
Linux:
- Pipewire sink got a fixup for sample rate switching. With that updated code, the back-end server of Pipewire will switch the base sample rate whenever Kodi is run without additional clients. This way, Kodi's audio will be output in the best possible and lossless way throughout the audio chain, including soundserver and audio device.
- Adjusted dependencies to build packages compatible with Ubuntu Focal to Noble for CPack building
- @fightforlife has fixed an issue with RenderCapture used by things like Hyperion that fixes sporadic black screen captures
webOS
- Map info key on webOS remotes.
- Disable core dumps by default to reduce less storage being used on webOS TVs.
- Implement shutdown/reboot .
Windows:
- Improved chroma upscaling when using Pixel Shaders or Software render methods, and also DXVA only in specific cases: AMD + old drivers + 10-bit SDR.
- Improved channel layout match in WASAPI when audio drivers do not support the exact speaker layout. This is only relevant for PCM (not passthrough).
- Increased the number of video surfaces in DXVA H.264 decoding to prevent video corruption in some rare H.264 streams.

Pictures

Long time contributer @notspiff added avif image support.
@enen92 fixed an Exif parsing regression that was introduced in Matrix (v19).

Scraping

.nomedia files can now be used to exclude folders inside a TV show: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24330
@78andyp fixed what looks like has been broken for a long period - the ability to scrape episodes in Bluray folders (BDMV).

Skinning

The Estouchy skin has been retired from default installs. If anyone would like to continue working on the skin for future use/availability, you can find the new home for the skin at https://github.com/jjd-uk/skin.estouchy for now.
The player control dialog for Estuary has been updated, along with other changes to bring the skin up to date for 5.17.0 API.
A fix for duplicate music flags was made by @jjd-uk.

UPnP

@enen92 has once again made an assortment of fixes for UPnP, such as fixed broadcasting of item updates and 'mark as watched' state.
An option was added to avoid volume synchronisation to a UPnP target.

Known Issues

You can see open issues on our tracker at https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues. However, to call out a couple of specifics, please be aware of the following if you're planning on upgrading:

There are seek issues with multi-part MP4 files on Android (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/23673).
We've had reports that the new splash screen looks like an OpenGL corruption; we know, it's not a problem, so don't panic. We'd be happy to have your artwork contributions if you'd like to work on an alternative.
If remote sources are unavailable at startup, users are seeing significant delays while waiting (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/23958).

We continue to march forward to what we hope will be a successful v21 Omega release later this year.

If you love to live on the bleeding edge, you can get Beta 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.

There is always a great deal more changes/fixes/updates than what we can highlight in these reports, so as usual you can see a fuller list of what has been merged between v21 and v20 here. For a more targeted look at the changes made since v21 Beta 2, you can see those changes here.

Kodi 20.4 "Nexus" - Release

Team Kodi — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 14:22:31 GMT

It looks like one last hurrah was premature for the "Nexus" line: we find ourselves back again already, this time with a new 20.4 release.

An assortment of bug fixes, some backports, no real new features. Full changelog since 20.3 on Github, as usual.

Android users, please see note at the bottom of this post

Release notes

Build

A backport aimed at fixing the failure rate of binary addon builds has been merged by @garbear.

Input

Update to the controller addons.

Platform Specific

Android
- Several fixes have been backported from master to fix deployment issues on Google Play. Thanks to @joseluismarti for working with us on these.
- A number of fixes backported to resolve input issues (remotes/controllers).
iOS/tvOS
- A long-time-coming fix to reduce black screen playback when interlaced content is played on iOS/tvOS. Users should no longer have to specifically disable VTB Hardware playback for most interlaced content. Please keep in mind some methods of content playback (HTTP URLs provided in .strm files) will still be affected.
- A memory leak with game controllers on iOS/tvOS has been fixed by @kambala-decapitator.
tvOS
- @kambala-decapitator fixed what seems to be a long standing bug regarding framework plist metadata for shared library frameworks.
Windows
- A fix for AESinkWASAPI to improve fallback when the exact output channel layout isn't supported by drivers or hardware.

Android Deployment

We always do what's known as a "staged" roll out for Android - so, if you don't receive the update immediately, be patient, as it will come through over the next week. As the majority of fixes are related to Google Play deployment, we will deliberately be cautious with the schedule. If you do receive 20.4 and have any issues with the deployment, please let us know as soon as possible.

Update, 11 Feb 20:55 UTC

We're aware of some (at this time) non-specific "input issues" on Android - buttons not working properly, for example - so we've halted the deployment for now until we understand more. We would also advise against anyone installing manually unless you know how to roll back. Please bear with us while we isolate and squash the offending bug.

Oh, by the way - we might have mentioned this before - does anyone know of any good Android developers who'd like to give us a hand? We're a little short-handed at the moment :(

Kodi at FOSDEM 2024

Team Kodi — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 19:14:24 GMT

Hi!

This is just a quick note to let everyone know that Team Kodi will be present at the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels on 3 & 4 February 2024. We will have a booth in Building H level 1 where you can try out Kodi and chat with us at your leisure :)

We have team members attending that are knowledgeable about, among other things, Python add-on programming, Kodi on Linux, the Kodi flatpak package, and Kodi on embedded GPUs.

If you're in the area, we'd love to see you and get your first-hand feedback about ... well, anything, really. We're also planning to have some sample branded merchandise for you to look at - so, please, join us for a chat and a coffee!

Kodi 20.3 "Nexus" - Release

Team Kodi — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 09:24:41 GMT

A new year dawns, and brings with it one last hurrah for the Kodi "Nexus" release line.

An assortment of bug fixes, some backports, no real new features. Full changelog since 20.2 on Github, as usual.

Release notes

Estuary

An assortment of fixes for Estuary, including home categories' focus positions, alignment of counter labels and Shift view for collections.
Fixes to the weather layout when busy.

Game/Retroplayer

Fixed controllers not assigned to game ports correctly on Android.
Fixed blue/pink washed out colours on Windows with 10-bit displays.
Fixed possible crash in Port dialogue box.
Fixed typo for the mouse middle button in Controller dialogue box.

General

A DVD playback fix that resolves unmounted drives not being playable.
A fix for infinite loops in CPluginFile that occurred when using scrapers.
A fix for a crash that occurred due to Addon settings being destructed in an incorrect order.
Redact some information from Toast notifications (usernames/passwords incorrectly being shown).
A memory leak in context menus was resolved.
Image cache handling was fixed to correctly regenerate when cached files for JSON API consumers.

Music

Music Library: now able to automatically recover if library cleaning was interrupted previously for some reason.

Platform Specific

Android
- Fixed (workaround implemented) possible audio out-of-sync in recent AMLogic BSP devices: FireTV Cube 3rd Gen, Homatics Box R 4K Plus, …
Linux
- VP9 Profile 2 playback failure was fixed.
- A fix for a leak of EGLFences in the DRM Prime renderer.
macOS/iOS
- Fix a crash on Apple silicon-based Macs when pressing the Caps Lock key.
tvOS
- Fixed: Not persistent binary addons (PVR) settings.
Windows
- Fixed: 24 Hz refresh rate related to HDR in specific use cases only (when Windows HDR auto-switch is not used).
- Fixed: audio device "WASAPI:default" was listed multiple times in audio device list.
- Fixed: fractional refresh rates 119.88 Hz and higher were not displayed correctly.

Pictures

An EXIF parsing regression from v19 was resolved.

PVR

Fix TV channel subtitles not displayed on playback start, even when activated in subtitle settings.
Fix recordings with a path containing a colon (':') not being displayed in recordings window.

UPNP

A fix for a crash that occurred when a user added a UPnP source without having UPnP enabled.
Playback from remote sources (ftp, http, etc.) has been fixed.

Video

A fix to the default Select action on certain movie-related windows.

Thanks, as always, to everyone who has helped us track down and fix any issues. We endeavour to minimise the issues everyone experiences, but with such a large project, and the fact everyone contributing to Kodi is a volunteer, issues and bugs are a part of life. If you happen to experience any bugs or issues, please don't hesitate to reach out on the forums, or raise an issue on GitHub.

Android Deployment

13th January, 10:00 UTC: After the initial problems with 20.3 on Google Play ("Cannot download OBB"), @fuzzard has done a sterling job and has now released an updated version into the wild. Testing suggests that it's installing correctly now, and so will be available to all Android users imminently.

Thanks for bearing with us on this. Apologies again for any inconvenience, and, please, let us know if you have any problems (or, indeed, if you're an Android developer who might want to give us some help...).

Kodi 21.0 "Omega" Beta 2

Team Kodi — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 11:04:29 GMT

We are keeping things ticking over with Kodi 21 "Omega" with the second Beta release!

First, we'd like to make a few targeted announcements.

Android users

Many users may still be on the Kodi testing track for their Android devices. It's far easier to leave the testing track from a 'phone-based device, but be aware that if your device is on the testing track, we will be continuing to deploy Beta 2 releases over the next week or so. If you wish to opt out of the testing group, one way you can is by visiting the following link Google Play - Kodi testing track. From here, you can opt out for your Google Play account. This is the best (and possibly only) way to opt out on many Android TV devices (e.g. Nvidia Shields).

With that said, for those adventurous types who would like to help us with testing, you can use the same link to opt in for a Google Play account.

Skin Developers

An API bump will be made with the next release of Kodi 21's testing cycle. See the following PRs for details:

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23926

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23862

This will require changes and submissions to the Omega branch for skins for those who submit to the Kodi Repository. Reach out on the forums if you have any questions/concerns.

The following forum thread has the skinning change info for Omega: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=372280&pid=3174566#pid3174566

And now, for the list of changes for Beta 2.

Build/Dependencies

A few dependencies have been bumped (openssl, python) as part of the normal update process.

Estuary, Estouchy

@jjd-uk has made a fix for Shift view overlays (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24168).
Media flags for music have been added to Estuary by @jjd-uk as well (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24162).

General

A change was made by @CastagnaIT that narrows the scope of the optional track title providing language specific audio track data. Information regarding this advanced setting can be found on the wiki at https://kodi.wiki/view/Advancedsettings.xml#languagecodes.
@rschupp has contributed to the removal of Kodi's use of the library pcrecpp. The use of this was changed to use C++ standard library capabilities.
A fix has been made for when some XML files written by Kodi would add a trailing null character, therefore making the XML invalid.
Several users contributed to compiler warning fixes affecting multiple platforms. Thanks to @CrystalP, @fuzzard, @thexai.
@Rechi has made further fixes to satisfy more static analysis based fixes/warnings.
The FFmpeg library has been updated to 6.0.1 for all platforms that don't use a system-provided FFmpeg version.
@rmrector continues to improve artwork cache handling. PVR images are now handled like most other image types for the caching system.
@ksooo has been fixing further context menu fallout as he endeavours to improve the maintainability and consistency across Kodi's context menus.

Network

A couple of fixes to IPv6 usage by @joseluismarti.

Platform Specifics

Android:
- More Dolby Vison updates have been submitted by @quietvoid. The latest fixes playback when some data is not provided by the FFmpeg library, and we would incorrectly categorise it as a different Dolby Vision profile (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24172).
Linux:
- @smp79 has submitted a fix to VDPAU HQ scalers.
macOS:
- @kambala-decapitator has updated our macOS signing tools to use Apple's newer notarytool. The previous usage of altool was deprecated/shutdown by Apple in November.
Windows:
- The much-awaited HDR10 support was added for Xbox (@thexai https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24083).
- The crash with VC-1 and some MPEG-2 videos when using DXVA decoding was corrected (@thexai https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24085).
- A crash when closing Kodi on Xbox has been fixed by @thexai.

PVR

@ksooo continues to fix/improve Kodi's PVR system. Multiple fixes for different race conditions were merged for Beta2.
Fix recordings with a path containing a ':' not displayed in recordings window.

Python

@the-black-eagle has added songVideoURL to the InfoTagMusic interface.

Skinning

xbmc.gui version has been bumped to 5.17 (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23926).
@DeltaMikeCharlie has added infolabels for locale based information (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24028).

UPnP

@enen92 has continued making improvements in the long neglected UPnP feature of Kodi. The ability to serve smartlists via UPnP was added in https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24008, as well as a fix to the case where sometimes some UPnP usage to stop before it was started (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24201).

Videos

@thexai has upgraded what was traditionally an advanced setting regarding Caching to a category in Settings > Services, containing the buffering fine-tuning settings. If you previously used these advanced settings, you will need to make the changes in the normal settings windows to make use of them now. The settings made in advancedsettings.xml are no longer handled (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24049, https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24117).
More settings were added to control the NFS and SMB chunk size (@thexai https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24019).
The setting Player > Videos > Use Display HDR capabilities was renamed to Adjust display HDR mode and moved next to Adjust refresh rate (@crystalp https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24100).
After playing more than 5 seconds in a chapter, the Previous chapter action rewinds to the beginning of the chapter for a more intuitive behaviour (@crystalp https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24066).

Known Issues

You can see open issues on our tracker at https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues. However, to call out a couple of specifics, please be aware of the following if you're planning on upgrading:

There are seek issues with multi-part MP4 files on Android (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/23673).
We've had reports that the new splash screen looks like an OpenGL corruption; we know, it's not a problem, so don't panic. We'd be happy to have your artwork contributions if you'd like to work on an alternative.
If remote sources are unavailable at startup, users are seeing large delays of startup (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/23958).

We continue to march forward to what we hope will be a successful v21 Omega release in the new year.

If you love to live on the bleeding edge, you can get Beta 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.

Kodi 21.0 "Omega" Beta 1

Team Kodi — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 10:39:36 GMT

Things are beginning to heat up for Kodi 21 "Omega" with the first Beta release!

First, we would like to make a few targeted announcements.

Android users

Many users may still be on the Kodi testing track for their Android devices. It's far easier to leave the testing track from a 'phone-based device, but be aware that if your device is on the testing track, we will be starting to deploy the Beta 1 release over the next week or so. If you wish to opt out of the testing group, one way you can is by visiting the following link Google Play - Kodi testing track. From there, you can opt out for your Google Play account. This is the best (and possibly only) way to opt out on many Android TV devices (e.g. Nvidia Shields).

With that said, for those adventurous types who would like to help us with testing, you can use the same link to opt in for a Google Play account.

Skin Developers

An API bump will be made with the next release of Kodi 21's testing cycle. See the following PR's for details

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23926

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23927

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23862

This will require changes and submissions to the Omega branch for skins for those who submit to the Kodi Repository. Reach out on the forums if you have any questions/concerns.

And now, for the list of changes for Beta 1.

Build/Dependencies

A number of changes to the cmake build system have been made. These will be mostly invisible to users, but the intention is to modernise our cmake usage to prepare us for the future more easily.
The cmake build system, when targeting Multi Config Generators (VS/Xcode), will now create a full complete build directory to allow a Kodi executable to be run immediately without the direct use of an IDE like VS. This is also the start to allow us to build dependencies for Windows for shared libraries, and be able to package them correctly.
A number of fixes to allow building with GCC13 have been made. This mostly involved the transitive inclusion of headers in system headers being removed/changed. The fixes have been to explicitly include those headers in our code.

Estuary, Estouchy

Retire Favourites dialog, use Favourites window instead (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23861).

Favourites

Add selected items of the target to favourite's context menu (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23895).
Fix crash on moving items in favourites widget and favourites window (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23946).

General

A bug was recently introduced that led to external subtitle entries becoming unavailable on streamdetails. This was fixed in https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23835.
A fix to allow .strm files to properly use resume points was made by @Acidzero2020.
An improvement to the Event Log "toast" notifications has been made by @DaVukovic to provide more meaningful information when an item fails to scrape TV Shows.

Input

A fix to allow Python addons to correctly handle custom controller button inputs was made by @icr8ions. This allows addons like the Keymap Editor to correctly recognise and handle actions from custom controllers (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23789).

Music

A PR that extends the Python 'generic artist' scraper to fetch the associated YouTube video links for an artist from theaudiodb, and then match them up to songs already scanned into the user's music library. This allows skins to then display links to the corresponding song video. More information can be see in the PR from @the-black-eagle (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/22654).

Player

Updated some internal constants to handle better very high bit rate streams (maximums of UHD Blu-Ray at least - 144 Mbit/s) (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23883).

Platform Specifics

Android:
- A fix to actually package themes for skins like Estuary/Estouchy was made. This was found by accident, and dates way back to the implementation of our Android platform (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23782).
- @joseluismarti continues his improvement of our Android code. This time he has updated some code to use Android-provided values rather than a manually-curated list of values. (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23769).
- A workaround for an Amlogic BSP audio bug that affects many platforms, even modern Google devices (more information here, fixed in https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/commit/be049ba900df39b9f2cef820a19088f8aa1ba7d2).
FreeBSD
- We don't have too many improvements to our FreeBSD port, however @lrusak has brought FreeBSD in line with Linux with its usage of the command line argument --audio-backend (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23886).
Linux:
- A fix for a crash with Pipewire was contributed by @dobo90.
- @lrusak has implemented a command line switch (--gl-interface=<interface>) to replace the old environment variable usage of KODI_GL_INTERFACE (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23907).
- Kodi's usage of the system ping utility has been replaced with an internal implementation (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23870).
- DRMPrime has had a check based on pitch value removed as it was causing failures with some formats, like single plane and/or compressed ones, where the pitch can be 0 and therefore it has no meaning. Thanks @jernejsk (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23889).
macOS:
- SDL windowing while not enabled by default since Alpha1 (in favour of native windowing) was still a possible build compile switch. It has finally been removed in Beta 1 (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/22990).
- Kodi now relies on an external library, smctemp, to display the CPU and GPU sensor values - this being valid for either x86 or Apple Silicon (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23770).
- Network info subsystem was improved avoiding the execution of external commands to obtain the current gateway and DNS server list (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23724).
- Improvements to input, e.g. the enter keyboard key was not being recognised (only key return) (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23860).
webOS
- @quietvoid has contributed a fix to allow webOS to play back AV1 DolbyVision files on supported devices (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23771).
- Support to allow webOS to to suspend to background rather than exit was made by @sundermann (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23684).
- With the support to suspend/minimise for webOS, behaviour to pause/resume media playback when Kodi is minimised/restored has been implemented by @sundermann.
- Initial support for webOS 4 devices has been implemented by @mariotaku.
Windows:
- Fixed Windows 11 refresh rate switching (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23766).
- Improved the vsync detection used by "Sync playback to display" mode (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23893). Breaks compatibility with Windows 7 (which is not supported in v21).

PVR

Fix 'switch to previous channel' not working if it is in another group than the currently playing channel (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23932).
Fix Live TV - Randomly spinner stays forever although channel is playing fine (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23844).

Skinning

@DeltaMikeCharlie has provided a way for skinners to use a ParentalRatingCode info label (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23586).
Infolabels for video width and height have been added by @graham8 (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23850).

Videos

Respect default select action setting at more places - Home screen widgets, PVR recordings window, Favourites window (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23848 , https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23857).
Add default play action setting to control resume behaviour when starting playback of videos (xhttps://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23863).
Fix play/resume of BD and DVD disc images not working from Home screen widgets (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23905).
Automatic video rotation from metadata was fixed (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23832).
Teletext language codes sometimes were not persisted correctly in the teletext browser (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23890).
Improvements to the teletext browser window (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23896).
EDL files are now valid even if they are not on the same subnet of the Kodi host - valid across all private subnet ranges (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23836).
@joseluismarti also contributed outside of his usual Android improvements with a fix for a crash when scan to library on a directory contained new movies (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23767).

Known Issues

You can see open issues on our tracker at https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues. However, to call out a couple of specifics, please be aware of the following if you're planning on upgrading:

There are seek issues with multi-part MP4 files on Android (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/23673).
There is an upstream FFmpeg issue that means that OGG music playback does not work. This will be rectified upstream to Kodi. (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/23198).
We've had reports that the new splash screen looks like an OpenGL corruption; we know, it's not a problem, so don't panic. We'd be happy to have your artwork contributions if you'd like to work on an alternative.

If you love to live on the bleeding edge of new, you can get Beta 1 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.

As usual - well, it is open source - you can see what's changed between v21 and v20 here. For a more targeted look at the changes made since v21 Alpha 3, you can see those changes here.