Software update: Kodi 20.2

Version 20.2 of Kodi has been released. This cross-platform media center software is developed for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. In version 20.0, which is codenamed Nexus, we find av1 hardware decoding for Android and Linux, there is support for input stream via the av1 codec and ffmpeg has been updated to version 4.4. The changelog for this second update can be found below:

Audio

• An assortment of E-AC3 related fixes were backported.

Estuary

• A fix to the Music Viz screen has been made in an endeavor to chase that elusive target of perfection
• Fixes to the seekbar timer when seeking.

Game/Retro player

• A fix to a crash by memory exhaustion when some emulators are used.

General

• A whole assortment of fixes were made to fix building Kodi with GCC13.

Platform Specific

• Android

  • A fix for a crash that occurred when >100 jobs where scheduled for the Android TV recommendation channels.
  • For some old Android devices that had both MediaTek and Google decoders for some media, a preference to using the Google decoder was put in as the MediaTek decoders fail to play back audio in encrypted streams.

• Linux

  • A PR was reverted that fixes some Linux setups to use the more generic library (GL) rather than the specific GLX library.

• macOS/iOS

  • Fix speech recognition not working (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23341).

• Windows

  • Fixes to HDR playback when windows was already in HDR mode.
  • A backported fix for a potential deadlock for Xbox users when using pixel shaders and SW decoding.

PVR

• Fix crash on saved search (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23195).
• Fix last opened group not always restored on Kodi startup (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23165).

Python

• @garbear has backported a fix for setting Picture and Game info via infotags.
• GameInfo has been added to the Player class to allow get/set GameInfoTag data.
• A fix was backported that mainly affected Linux platforms: the path used when searching for modules was appending Kodi script paths at the end of the list, and therefore could potentially find system Python scripts/modules instead of Kodi-specific scripts/modules

Video

• Fix watched/unwatched status not taken into account for items not added to video library when creating playlists (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23398).
• Fix missing watched/unwatched status in Playlist window (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23013).