Software Update: Kodi 18.6

Version 18.6 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 64bit version from Kodi and is now also available through the Windows Store. Finally, the media player has been improved, which means that fewer stutters should occur, and it can also handle 4k and 8k resolutions, HDR, DRM and the latest codecs. The release notes for this release are as follows:

Kodi “Leia” 18.6 Release

And….here we are again. The latest Kodi release in the 18.x “Leia” cycle, with more (count them!) and better (measure them!) bug fixes for your various delight, delectation, and delirious… discussion?

18.6 is here. More nasty (and not-so-nasty) problems fixed, more bugs squashed, more happiness and love for all. This release is about backports: where practical, we’ve brought bug fixes forwards from the all forthcoming 19.x release, so you get the benefit sooner rather than later.

As usual, you can find full details of closed pull requests on GitHub, so explore that if you want the details, but the summary would be…

audio

• Fixes around visualizations
• Fixes around pause/resume
• Fixes around TrueHD crashes
• Workaround firmware bug (AMLogic v23) (sidenote: there are many more Android audio fixes that can’t be merged into 18.x “Leia” because of old AMLogic workarounds)
  Fix to correctly resume audio-only MPEG-TS streams
• Correct headphone enumeration (Android)

Build System

• Updates for missing includes
• Updates for Cmake (Windows)
• Updates for device handling and packaging (macOS)

games

• Fixes for launching disc images and .zip files
• Fixes for black screen for RGB emulators (Rpi)

Interface/Look and feel

• Fixes around TextureCache
• Fixes for windowing, refresh rate, mode change and others (Android)
• Fixes for floating/split keyboard (iOS)
• Fix for artist slideshow (Estuary)
• Fix media view from addon given content

Playback/Display

• Fixed race condition for OnPlaybackStarted
• Fixes for MIME type (Android)
• Support for DolbyVision streams via addons
• Fixes for maximum width and height/vertical-shift (Android)
• Fix for scanning in sub directories
• Fix size of EAGL layer on external screen (iOS)
• Fix for glTexImage3D (Linux)
• Fix for seeking issues
• Reset playlist on new file playback

PVR

• Fix for multiline episode names

Other/General

• Fixed incorrectly formatted region time
• Pass JSON serialized path settings to python scrapers
• Fix file access on auto-mounted sources
• Fix seeking with FileCache lockup
• Fix passthrough on USB devices (Android)
• Fix crash if profile.xml gets broken
• Fix cache forward size on EOF

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’ve 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.