Software Update: Kodi 18.7

Version 18.7 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” 18.7 Release

You may have noticed that we’ve adopted a RERO approach to Kodi – release early, release often. Our aim is to fix problems more quickly, and then get those fixes out into the wild equally as quickly. This might mean some issues escape alongside the bug fixes, but, overall, it should mean better software, sooner, and without the disruption of a major version bump.

So, with no further fanfare: another release in the Kodi 18.x “Leia” cycle. The usual rules apply: bug fixes, not new features or functionality; most will be invisible, but will be much-appreciated if you’re been suffering from a problem we’ve managed to address.

You can find full details of closed pull requests on GitHub, so explore that if you want the details, but TL;DR…

audio

• Fix to not reset user-set volume (Android)
• Fixes around multi-channel audio track support

Playback/Display

• Fixes to Bluray subtitle language recognition
• Fix playback or bus-encrypted bluray discs
• Improved library handing for plugins if media source is removed
• Use JNI instead of NDK for MediaCodec (Android)
• Further work on maximum width and height/vertical-shift (Android)
• Fixes around realtime handling of TS streams

Interface/Look and feel

• Fix for watch icons not showing when content type is not set (Estouchy)
• Fix navigation in skin settings (Estuary)
• Fix crash in favorites dialog
• Apply safe area settings to Kodi GUI (iOS)
• Fixes around focus after touch action
• Improvements around dialog/toast handling
• Fixed behavior when accessing locked media sources

music

• Fixes around library handling of “isalbumartist” field
• Fixes around expansion of .ISO images to avoid GUI freezes
• Ensure album artist isn’t blanked out when scraping

Build System

• Fix downloading dependencies from mirrors (Windows)
• Library updates – bump gnutls (3.6.11.1) and nettle(3.5.1)

PVR

• Fix EPG corruption when new channels are added during startup

Network

• Improvements around handling of proxy credentials
• Fix for proxy empty fields (proxy, username, password)

Addons

• Fix crash if an incompatible VFS addon is present
• Fix display of title for compressed package directories
• Fixes around addon settings folder naming

subtitles

• Fixes around decoding of HTML escape characters
• Fix around SMI (SAMI) subtitles and quoted start tags

Profiles

• Fixes for issues related to switching profile
• Fixes to saving of lock preferences (master lock, lock video windows, etc.)

Other/General

• Add “Swiss German” and “Portuguese (Brazil)” to language codes
• Fix to guard against assert in tinyxml
• Fix stack overflow when trying to find NFO files in a RAR file
• Implement range checking in URIUtils::resolvePath
• Implement support for extended local headers in ZIP files used by some scrapers