Software Update: Kodi 18.5

Version 18.5 of Kodi has been released. This cross platform media center software is developed for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. In version 18.0, codenamed Leia, the entire source code has been reviewed, among other things, with the aim of improving stability. Furthermore, several improvements have been made to the music library and watching live television, there is a full one 64bit version from Kodi and is now also available through the Windows Store. Finally, the media player has been improved, so there should be less stuttering, and can also handle 4k and 8k resolutions, hdr, drm and the latest codecs. The release notes for this release are as follows:

Kodi “Leia” 18.5 Release

In our ongoing mission to bring you the very greatest (and most reliable) media center software in the world, it’s time to let another point release escape into the wild. Usual rules apply: this isn’t about features, it’s about stability and usability.

As usual, you can find a full summary of closed pull requests on GitHub, but the summary would be …

Interface / Look-and-Feel

• Estuary and GUI info fixes, including scrollbar behavior, icon names, label changes
• Add dual support for Artist Slideshow 2.x and 3.x
• Fix to always allow ‘Black’ screen saver
• Fix wrong sort order list for music playlists node

Playback / Display

• Fixes to external subtitle playback
• Fixes to support for archives over UPnP
• Fixes to “queue item” and “play next” for STRM files with Plugin URL
• Fixes to “hide watched” status for videos
• Fixes to resume handling when marking a file as unwatched

PVR

• Fixes to EPG database storage, start / stop or PVR service
• Fix handling or open modal dialogs
• Fixes to commercial skip (EDL) processing

Other / General Fixes

• Multiple Android changes around windowing, secure decoder and SDK versions
• Multiple iOS changes, including support for iPhone 11 and 7th generation iPad, plus fixes for touch input, overlapping drawing surfaces, sandbox checks, notch support.
• MacOS fixes around windowing, where only a portion of the screen was correctly rendered
• Log files improvements around verbosity and security
• Shoutcast improvements
• Various fixes and improvements to add-on settings, package build documentation, build system, advancedsettings.xml, skin / profile changes and many other subsystems

The nature of point releases is that most of these changes won’t be visible to most people unless they address a specific problem you’d stumbled across. That said, they’re all real bugs, and real fixes, so thanks as always to all who found a bug, took the time to report it and, in some cases, provided a fix.