Software Update: Kodi 20 Beta 1

Version 20 of Kodi is in development and the first beta release has come out. This cross platform media center software is being developed for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. In version 20.0, codenamed Nexus, we find av1 hardware decoding for Android and Linux, support for input stream via the av1 codec and ffmpeg has been updated to version 4.4. The changelog for this release shows the following changes and improvements:

addons

• Assorted binary addon fixes/updates – imagedecoder, screensaver, vis.
• Fix/refactor “multi instance” GUI settings for addons. This work carries on from the PVR binary addons being able to have multiple backend instances (link).
• New id3 tag metadata stream support for PVR Radio addons (link).
• Add new SetVideoResolution with max resolution (link).

Database

• Clean DB was previously broken in earlier Nexus builds. This has now been fixed

disc

• Update libbluray to 1.3.2 for all platforms (link).
• Fix a “double free” issue when ejecting a disk (link)
• Handle BD_EVENT_DISCONTINUITY (link).

File system

• UPNP fixes for picture handling (link).
• First time contributor @ihipop improved support for subtitle formats when accessed via UPNP DLNA (link).

General

• Fix bookmark resume for .strm files (link).
• Fix jsonrpc Player.GetProperties response when playback from a widget is done (link).
• Fix race condition in CJobmanager causing crashes (link)
• Application refactors. A great effort by @notspiff refactoring some very old code into more manageable chunks.
• Assorted improvements found by static analysis tools.
• Write correct duration to tracks in M3U playlists (link).
• Improvements to the header inclusions for a lot of areas of Kodi. This is a step to improve build times in general that mostly aims to reduce the number of components rebuilt when changes were made in a few extremely common objects.
• Diagnosed and fixed a race condition in picture thumbnail loading (link).

Input

• mouse cleanup (link).

network

• Another first time contributor @jjlin added support for HTTPS proxies (link).

Unix-based platforms

• Android and Apple platforms now ship with Python 3.11 built in. Python 3.11 is a very notable release due to considerable improvements in CPython regarding speed. Check out the python release notes for more info.

Android

• Android builds will now be built as RelwithDebinfo by default for our Jenkins builds. This means nightlies and most other Android builds built by PRs will be with the more optimized RelwithDebinfo instead of Debug. This was done as some issues being investigated by devs was found to be purely cause by the slower Debug build types.
• A number of improvements
• More class parameters have been added to allow more corner cases for starting android apps (link).

macOS

• Prevent crash-on-exit (link).

TVOS

• Sensitivity on the Remote has been reduced, and the tooltip and setting has been made more intuitive

Windows

• Remember window position of Kodi when run in windowed mode (link).
• First time contributor @sryze fixed a cmake warning for windows building (link).
• A new setting to allow setting the peak luminance for a display (link).
• Fixes to slow python usage on UWP platforms (eg Xbox) (link).

PVR

• Assorted EPG search fixes.
• Added possibility to browse available PVR client add-ons from PVR settings.
• Channels and Recordings now can be sorted by provider.
• Various fixes and performance improvements.
• Large refactoring improvements.

Favorites

• Replace favorites dialog with new favorites window, providing different views and other enhancements.

Skinning

• Added a new infobol System.Setting(hideunwatchedepisodethumbs) (link).
• Estuary specifics
  • PVR Channel Manager redesign.
  • Click on PVR Home screen section icon now opens Channels window again.
  • Some smaller changes to the PVR OSD.
  • Extend music context menu functionality, add ability to play albums directly from home screen.
  • Extend video context menu functionality.

Subtitles

• Fix for 3D MVC subtitles not appearing correctly when frame packed (link).

Video

• Input stream support for AV1 codec (link).
• Don’t attempt to use hardware AV1 decode if forcing software decoding. This fixes AV1 thumbnail generation on devices that don’t support AV1 hardware decoding (link).