Kodi News

Kodi 22 "Piers" Alpha 3

Team Kodi — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:22:00 GMT

Announcing the release of Kodi 22 “Piers” Alpha 3!

Usual words - the step from 21 to 22 is a major release, but it’s also an Alpha at this stage, so you’re going to get some bugs as well as funky new features. That is, of course, a major part of the point of early release software: please raise Github issues with full debug logs to help us resolve any regressions you wonderful testers come across.

Okay, what’s new in this version?

Changelog

Release highlights

Added support for taglines in TV shows
Added support for H264 AVCC subtitles
Added support for full IANA language tags
Added JSON RPC methods “Player.GetChapters” and “Player.OnPropertyChanged”
Upgraded FFmpeg to v8.0.1
Upgraded Python to v3.14.3
Changed MySQL/MariaDB charset to utf8mb4 and collation to general_ci (case insensitive)

Video

Improved Blu-ray support for both menus and playback
Improved TV show episode handling for blu-ray
Improved changing chapters in movies
Improved seeking during tempo change

Audio

Changed default samplerate from 44.1kHz to 48kHz
Fixed missing 200ms of audio at the start of video playback
Fixed occasional missing audio when changing playback speed
Fixed AC3 audio duration being incorrect for non-48KHz content
Improved handling of low-latency audio

Subtitles

Fixed handling of WebVTT (ISOBMFF) subtitles
Fixed PGS/VobSub subtitle selection for foreign audio tracks
Fixed crash when handling some BCP47 language tags added in Alpha 2

Library

Improved tagline handling for movies and TV shows

Games

Added N64 support using software rendering
Improved shader support
Fixed Black screen for games with unaligned textures
Fixed crash when changing resolution

Streaming and network

Fixed playback of tcp:// streams
Fixed media info display for strm:// streams
Fixed occasional errors resuming UPnP playback

Stacks and compressed archives

Added support for folder stacks, useful for DVD/Bluray folders
Improved playback of folder stacks
Improved handling media inside compressed archives
Fixed handling of zip files greater than 4GB

Profiles

Improved creating profiles in custom folders
Fixed deadlock when viewing Weather with multiple profiles
Highlighted current profile in profile selection dialog

Platforms

Android

Fixed Auto Frame Rate (AFR) when resuming from standby
Improved handling of Dolby Vision L5 metadata
Improved handling of foreign subtitles

webOS Video

General improvements for Dolby Vision support
Improved handling of Dolby Vision L5 metadata
Fixed tempo control

webOS Audio

Improved audio passthrough support
Improved volume handling in non-passthrough mode
Improved Dolby Digital audio when using eARC
Fixed AAC playback on some older versions of webOS

Windows

Added front-to-back rendering
Changed default audio output to XAUDIO and WASAPI
Fixed Kodi unable to run on Windows 8.1

Linux

Improved power management for systems without logind
Extended range of keyboard keys and remote buttons
Fixed long-pressing keyboard keys on Wayland

FreeBSD

Extract to disk instead of RAM for large compressed archives

A little love for developers and security researchers

(For researchers) Dropped some unused code that kept tripping CVEs
(For developers) New KodiAI app on GitHub
(For developers) Added support for Visual Studio 2026
(For developers) Improved compatibility with C++23
(For developers) Added meson support for building dependencies

Known Issues

Kodi is incompatible with MySQL 9.6 (‘sets’ is now a reserved keyword). A fix will be devised for the next v22 prerelease.
Blu-ray stream details aren’t saved in the library

Builds

If cutting-edge software is your thing, you can get Alpha 3 from here. Select your platform of choice, and look in the “Prerelease” section. Again, though, please: expect some breakage, don’t use this as your daily installation unless you know how to get things working again, and please share your experiences back with us so we can really get going on those bugs. And take a backup first!

As usual, in the full spirit of open source, you can see what’s changed since Alpha 2 here and from v21.3 here.

DevCon 2026 - Barcelona Revisited - Part II

Prof Yaffle — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:54:00 GMT

So, here we are, back in the room after a day of sidebar meetings, coding, hacking, experimenting, and general conferencing. Time for some more structured sessions, starting with some of our partner projects.

Chewitt started us off with an overview of LibreELEC: hardware updates and changes, new chip set support, some challenges with older SoCs, plans for standardising e.g. kernel trees more, and so on. He also covered topics such as the challenges around supporting set-top box DVB tuners, plus deprecated video drivers and implications for users. Beyond that, the project is healthy, with a broadly stable user base and positive finances.

Keeping with third-party projects, Flole next gave a brief update on Tvheadend, mostly around development status, plans for a new interface, CI/build process, and a few others.

(As an aside, both projects have recently celebrated milestone anniversaries: LibreELEC is ten years old, and Tvheadend has just passed 20. Happy birthday to both projects!).

And to collect the set, samnazarko then took the floor to talk about OSMC. As a turnkey, commercial consumer device, things are going well, although there’s pressure from RAM prices as you’d probably expect. He talked about the challenges around TV-led playback versus player-led (basically, where’s the decoding being done), and took a long detour through HDR technologies, colour spaces and tone mapping.

Next up, sarbes spoke about upcoming UI changes, mostly in the sense of textures and component rendering. These will deliver significant performance gains on low-end and embedded devices, and anything using a heavier, multi-layer skin.

razzee then took us through some website updates. These aren’t really user-facing, but shouldd give us some performance benefits as well as security improvements: library updates, a new framework, and updates to the CMS itself. We also discussed future options and suggestions for the site.

This conversation segued into blog/website workflow, how we could streamline that or open it up to more contributions, and how our AI tools could perhaps help with some contect-aware automation..

Juddering towards the end of the conference, jernej talked us through Linux colour APIs, which expose hardware capabilities to help with HDR on this OS.

And that’s about it. Thanks to everyone for attending, and, equally, thanks to everyone reading this for the support. You are the people who make Kodi what it is.

See you in 2028 … probably 😉

DevCon 2026 - Barcelona Revisited - Part I

Prof Yaffle — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:00:00 GMT

Well, hello everyone! It’s that time of year again, when your favourite development team rouse themselves from their long winter slumber and emerge, blinking in the light, to reconnect with their fellow creatures. Welcome to DevCon 2026!

We’re coming to you this year from about an hour outside Barcelona, which makes this a return visit. Not that it matters, I guess; you probably know how this works by now, so let’s get straight in …

As seems to be tradition now, we kicked off with a round of reminiscences - how long people have been team members, how they first got involved in Kodi, and past DevCon glories. Hey, don’t judge, we don’t get to see each other very often.

keith then gave a quick board/financial overview. The Kodi project remains firmly solvent, although we do get far less money from donations and sponsorships than once was the case. DevCon is our largest single expense, so we’ll almost certainly skip 2027 to make sure we can invest in hardware, hosting, Weblate, trademark fees and similar.

Speaking of trademarks, we’ve been working through many years of Foundation legacy, tidying up loose ends. It’s all long overdue, but there’s a chunk of legal and government costs there that we still need to incur.

We then moved onto a conversation about AI tools, options on the market, and their value - both relative costs and how they might work within the extended Kodi development ecosystem.

Next up, GSoC 2027 - how much do we want to participate, who might mentor, what potential projects.

razze then picked up a theme we’ve been watching for a couple of years now - the viability of moving from Slack to [matrix] as the latter continues to mature. One of the biggest challenges is the inability to migrate channel histories. As such, we’ll quite probably stay where we are unless we have some more compelling reason to make the switch.

Sticking with razze, we then switched direction to Flatpak and how that’s shaping up for future releases. We have some challenges about packaging add-ons, the resultant size of any downloads and what options we might have there.

Rewinding slightly, keith next lead a conversation about our existing use of AI, and our KodiAI tool. This is a home-grown capability that came about to get around the restrictions of mainstream tools, although it still uses those tools behind the scenes. We’re currently using this for PR code reviews and issues, but we also talked about future possibilities and where we might go next. We may well come back to this for a bit of a deeper dive over the next couple of days if time allows.

Moving on, garbear took the floor to update everyone on progress with Retro player and peripheral/accessory support. Those updates include multi-disc support to emulated games that came on more than one CD - effectively, a playlist. He also covered further work on video filters - a long-standing “coming soon” feature formerly known as shaders - and how they can be used to alter the appearance of a game in realtime.

While he was up, garbear then moved on to release management: some of the challenges we have with the 21.x series due to Android API bumps, and some of the plans for the release of 22.x alpha to beta to release.

Next up, yol took us through some server topics, specifically around current OS versions, implications and options.

A quick segue into upcoming conferences, events and similar, and we’re pretty much done for the night.

Take care, all, and we’ll see you again tomorrow.

Scheduled Maintenance: 12th/13th January, 2026

Prof Yaffle — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 07:32:07 GMT

UPDATE 15 Jan 18:00 UTC: The hosting provider has fixed some faulty RAM in one of the systems, and also resolved an issue in network configuration. Normality has now been resumed; thank you for your patience.

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UPDATE 13 Jan 19:00 UTC: The servers didn’t come back up for some reason - we’ve tried a few things, but that didn’t work so we’re now working with the hosting provider to resolve this. We don’t yet have any timeline for resolution.

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We don’t do this very often, but, sometimes, life happens, and it’s only fair to forewarn you.

We’ve been notified by one of our hosting providers of scheduled maintenance that will take our mirror servers off air for a while. During this window, you will not have access to downloads of anything we host - so, basically any new downloads of the Kodi application and add-ons. Kodi itself will remain available where it’s hosted in a third-party repository (e.g. an app store).

The window for this maintenance is:

Monday, January 12 2026, between 10AM and 6PM PST - so 18:00 12 January to 06:00 13 January UTC.

We’ll obviously bring everything back on line as soon as we can, but assume no access within these hours. If you have to try installing anything, be aware that it will error and none of the admins will be able to check what’s happening either. Please, just ignore any errors on launch for now, and wait until the mirrors all come back and synchronise.

Kodi 22 "Piers" Alpha 2

Team Kodi — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 08:42:18 GMT

It is the season for giving, so, for those who want the latest and greatest, this is for you: hot on the heels of Kodi 22 “Piers” Alpha 1 (and Kodi 21.3 “Omega”), we present the perhaps predictably-titled Alpha 2.

Usual words - the step from 21 to 22 is a major release, but it’s also an Alpha at this stage, so you’re going to get some bugs as well as funky new features. That is, of course, a major part of the point of early release software: please raise GitHub issues with full debug logs to help us resolve any regressions you wonderful testers come across.

Okay, what’s new in this version?

Video/audio

Upgraded to FFmpeg 8
Added HEIF/HEIC support
Fixed playing streams with more than 256 audio+video+subtitles tracks
Improved audio channel handling
Improved subtitle selection for “forced_only” subtitles

Library/Sources and Management

Added Season Plot
Added Movie/TV Show Original Language
Fixed bug in Alpha 1 where scanning fails if local NFO files are present
Improved Video Version importing

PVR

Fixed Daylight Saving Time switching issues

Weather

New Weather Skinning API
Various fixes and improvements for the Home widget and Weather window

Python

Upgraded to Python 3.13.7
Added ability to set available fanart

Platforms

Windows
- Multiple Kodi instances can now be run simultaneously
Android
- New dialog explaining microphone permission
macOS
- Fixed high CPU usage in the background
LG webOS
- Improvements for new Media Pipeline
- Fixed very bright subtitles and GUI when playing HDR / DolbyVision content
- Fixed subtitles sometimes not displaying

If cutting-edge software is your thing, you can get Alpha 2 from here. Select your platform of choice, and look in the “Prerelease” section. Again, though, please: expect some breakage, don’t use this as your daily installation unless you know how to get things working again, and please share your experiences back with us so we can really get going on those bugs. And take a backup first!

As usual, in the full spirit of open source, you can see what’s changed since Alpha 1 here and from v21.3 here.

Kodi 21.3 "Omega" - Release

Team Kodi — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 10:01:11 GMT

The more observant of you will have noticed that we’ve had some issues getting this version out to everyone, so some of you will have received this already depending on what channel you use (Flatpak, Google Play, winget community repos…). No matter, it’s here for everyone now.

While work is well underway on our next major release, with Alphas already out for Kodi 22.x “Piers”, this doesn’t mean we’ve given up on 21.x “Omega”, as that’s very much still our current release. So, with minimal fanfare, we present to you a package of changes, bug fixes and backports that we like to call Kodi 21.3 “Omega”. Full changelog from 21.2 here.

Release Summary

Major user-facing changes include:

Video

Added HDR support on Xbox One
Fixed Blu-ray playback on Linux
Fixed audio/subtitle issues when resuming Blu-rays
Fixed handling of HDR10 light metadata changes
Fixed subtitle selection for ISO 639-1 (two-letter) language codes

Library/Sources and Management

Improved speed of video library rescans
Fixed multi-episode files overwriting the first episode
Fixed info dialog for certain Movie Versions
Fixed some false positives detecting Movie Versions

Music

Fixed CDDB lookups using Gnudb.org’s CDDB API
Fixed album search failing for artist names

Audio

Fixed rare Pipewire crash when connecting/removing audio devices

PVR

Fixed crash when a PVR stream is stopped via remote app

Peripherals

Added support for Turkish keyboards on Linux
Fixed enabling and disabling Pulse-Eight CEC adapters
Fixed the Delete and Alternative Insert keys on macOS
Fixed minor visual glitches when managing peripherals

Addons

Fixed updating add-ons after 25 days of inactivity (extended to ~68 years)

Skin/GUI

Fixed busy dialog crash when multiple dialogs are opened
Fixed suspend dialog remaining open after the system wakes up
Improved touch support for slider dialog arrows

Network

Added support for HTTP Basic Authentication
Fixed some network streams failing due to interrupted HTTP/2 transfers
Updated libnfs to v6 for embedded platforms
Updated CA certificates to 2025-07-15 from the Mozilla CA certificate store

I know we always say this, but, genuinely - sincere thanks go out to everyone who’s helped to identify, isolate or fix any issues. If you know of anything that’s still irking you, please, post in the forums, or raise an issue on Github, as we can’t fix what we don’t know about.

As this is a point release, there are no major changes since the previous version, and you should be fine to install this straight over the top of any existing Kodi 21.x installation - indeed, this will happen automatically on many platforms. However, as for all software installations, back up your userdata beforehand if you’ve any doubts or have anything you can’t afford to lose (and definitely do this if you’re going for a major version upgrade).

A list of all changes for this version can be found at GitHub. If you want to read back on the full history of v21 itself, or of previous versions, you can find the corresponding articles in the relevant blog posts.

Application deployment on different platforms (notably the Microsoft Store) can vary considerably due to circumstances outside of our control, so just be patient, and the update will inevitably find its way through.

Windows Store/Android Deployment

Due to the internal and external hoops we need to jump through, it might be a little while before the update appears for you, and that’s before our usual staged approach to deployment. Sit tight, and it will be with you in due course (maybe the next week or two).

We also have some specific challenges with Google Play: they now require 16 KB memory page support for applications on 64-bit devices, which means that we’ve got to make some non-trivial changes to our toolchain. While we’ve done this for the 22.x branch, it’s more challenging to make a potentially significant change like this for a point release on a stable, release version. As such, we are unable to upload 21.3 for Android at the moment despite it being ready. We’ll let you know if and when this changes.

Kodi 22 "Piers" Alpha 1

Team Kodi — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 16:01:49 GMT

So, here we go once again - development (and developers) never actually sleep, so we’re pleased to present the first public preview of our next significant release: Kodi v22, “Piers”.

This is a major release, so, as you’d expect, it comes with many new features. However, it is also an Alpha release, so there’s a very good chance that something won’t work the way it’s intended to. As such, please be aware that installing this will most likely break things, which is kind of the point of releasing it: please raise Github issues with full debug logs to help us resolve any regressions you wonderful testers come across.

So, all that aside… what’s actually changed?

Video/audio

Upgraded to FFmpeg 7
Audio book chapter support
Movie Versions/Extras full redesign
Movie Sets support setting info and artwork
Better stream selection
Automatic cleaning of cached images/artwork

Blu-ray multi-episode support

New Blu-ray episode selection menu
Blu-ray episodes now have their own progress, media info and artwork
Library import/export now handles Blu-ray episodes
Episode ranges are now supported and shown in the library
Movie Versions/Extras are now supported for Blu-ray discs

PVR

New Recently Added Channels (plus new widget)
New Providers window (requires skin support)
New Custom Timers
Improved channel groups
Improved saved searches
Improved recording functionality
Improved EPG search
1-minute EPG resolution (requires skin support)

Games

Shader support (from Google Summer of Code 2017/2019)
Improved mouse and keyboard support
New scaling methods, including integer scaling
Fixed aspect ratio for some emulators
Fixed some micro-stuttering issues

GUI

Reduced memory usage for single- and dual-channel textures
Improved performance and memory usage on OpenGL and OpenGLES
Improved large texture image quality with better performance on slow devices
Implemented front-to-back rendering for better performance (OpenGL(ES) only)

Network

Improved SMB GUI settings
Support for SMBv2.0 devices lacking SMBv2.1 features such as “large MTU”
Fixed connecting to Windows SMB servers with no password
Drastically improved performance at listing large SMB directories

Platforms

Windows/Xbox
- Initial Windows ARM64 desktop support
- Python 3.13 on Windows/Xbox
- Enabled XAudio2 sink for Windows desktop (was previously only on Xbox)
- Enhanced Video Super Resolution feature with 10-bit SDR support (Intel and Nvidia) and HDR10 (Nvidia)
Android
- Enabled file sharing to other apps and players
- Improved channels on the home page
- Upgraded to Android 15
- Minimum Android version is now 7.0
- Android support for 16KB page size
LG webOS
- New unified media pipeline
Linux
- HDR passthrough on OpenGL (was previously only on OpenGLES)
- Support for the Wayland Color Management protocol, therefor supporting HDR on Wayland with compatible compositors
- Make Kodi work on systems using a Turkish locale

Peripherals

Improved OSMC Remote support
Improved Pulse-Eight CEC Adapter support
Improved Flirc support

Known issues

Scanning for new content will fail if local NFO files are present (fixed for Alpha 2)
Filesystems that use milliseconds can trigger a rescan

If you love life on the bleeding edge of new, you can get Alpha 1 from here. Select your platform of choice, and look in the “Prerelease” section. Again, though, please: expect some breakage, don’t use this as your daily installation unless you know how to get things working again, and please share your experiences back with us so we can really get going on those bugs. And take a backup first!

As usual, in the full spirit of open source, you can see what’s changed since v21.2 here.

Meet the Sponsor: Oregon State University Open Source Lab

Prof Yaffle — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 14:19:46 GMT

IMPORTANT UPDATE, 30th April

While we were proofreading this post and getting ready to publish it, we became aware of some terrible news: the OSUOSL is in very real danger of closing down at the end of this year due to recent funding changes, and they need immediate help. Lance Albertson, the Director of OSUOSL, explains it in his own words here.

This matters so much. Without getting into the rights and wrongs of US public sector funding, this could send shock waves through so many open source projects if it’s allowed to happen. Please, if you value their work - and we all should - and if there’s anything you or your employer can do to help them, we’d ask you to do so.

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It takes an army of people to create, maintain and deliver Kodi, but not everyone involved is a team member. As well as the obvious developers, graphics designers, forum moderators and similar, we’re also hugely dependent on our sponsors for both financial help and donations of infrastructure. It’s the latter category that we’d like to highlight today, specifically the Oregon State University Open Source Laboratory.

The OSUOSL is a nonprofit organisation that works to advance open source technologies, seeking to accelerate the growth of high-impact open source software projects, and promote a global open source culture of accessibility and increased productivity. The lab partners with industry leaders and policy makers to bring open source technologies to new sectors, including education, health and government.

To this end, they’ve been providing free hosting services for FOSS projects since 2003, and currently do so for more than 160 projects, including those of worldwide leaders like the Apache Software Foundation, the Linux Foundation, Drupal - and, of course, Kodi. They offer world-class hosting services, professional software development and on-the-ground training for promising students interested in open source management and programming. The most active organisation of its kind, the OSL delivers nearly 430 terabytes of information to people around the world every month from its hosted sites. Specifically for Kodi, they currently host a significant 2U, 96-core system that runs most of our build systems, as well as separate platforms that host a big part of our public-facing infrastructure: the forum, the wiki, and our pastebin site.

We’re immensely grateful for their assistance and support, and want to publicly thank them for everything they do. OSUOSL is primarily funded through grants, corporate sponsorships and individual contributions from the community. Please see their website for how you can help them to continue providing services such as this.

DevCon 2025 - Tirana - Part III

Prof Yaffle — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 11:48:54 GMT

Day Three dawns. We have a compressed schedule today before we break for individual workshops/breakouts - plus some people will be leaving us early in order to get home - so let’s get to work.

neo1973 opened the day with a discussion about merge policies, specifically around reviews and self-merging your own PRs. There’s a reality that, when you’ve been deep in a certain area of the code, you may well be the subject matter expert - for the moment, at least - so there’s nobody to necessarily critique the what of your code. As such, there’s an element of “publish and be damned”. There is, though, also the how: does the code itself stand up to inspection? We already use tools to sanity check the code, check for null pointers and undestroyed variables, and similar, so the quality side is already covered to a certain extent. That said, AI tools are falling into place and improving quickly, so there’s more that we can do here, and more to investigate.

Onwards into a conversation initiated by yol around some of our hosted infrastructure and some specific issues we have there. That in turn led into a more general conversation around hardware, usage, I/O and capacity, and similar: important to us, but probably less so to the general public.

Next up, chewitt with an update on LibreELEC: user numbers, current platform trends and future plans, dependency/kernel versioning, CI/build, upstreaming fixes, drivers, chipsets, hosting, finances, collaborations, architecture. For what should be obvious reasons, samnazarko weighed in where appropriate with an OSMC perspective.

Finally, lrusak gave an update on a long-desired feature: headless Kodi. It basically exists, it works, but it needs a good chunk of tidying up to make 100% certain that nothing tries to create or access a GUI on a non-existent window manager (e.g. popping up a notification toast). There are headless implementations - such as Docker images - already available from other sources, so this is really just about bringing this into the official release.

And, with that, the main conference comes to an end. Time to huddle together, fire up laptops, and do some coding.

So, that’s it for DevCon 2025. Genuine thanks to Tirana for the hospitality, and to everyone who’s helped to look after us this year - and thanks to you for reading.

Until the next time … lamtumirë, dhe faleminderit.

Team Kodi 2025, Tirana

DevCon 2025 - Tirana - Part II

Prof Yaffle — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 21:17:34 GMT

… and we’re back! The skies are blue, the sun is shining, we’re fed and refreshed, yet we’re locked in a darkened, overly-warm, windowless room for today’s session. The privations we suffer for our art; you really have no idea.

Let’s get to it, then - welcome to DevCon Day Two!

We kicked off the session with a bit of administrative insight from keithah - how the Board operates, our bank account structure, what we use for 2FA and virtual postal addresses, interaction with tax authorities for our non-profit status, and similar. Nothing of interest to the outside world, but an insight for our team members on some more of the internal moving parts.

While going through some of our open issues, one triggered a conversation (as these things do) about advancedsettings.xml versus GUI windows, and what, if anything, should be “promoted” from the former to the latter. Kodi is a complex application, and the GUI settings are already overwhelming for many, but asking advanced users to edit text files is a little old school (as well as being clearly inconsistent or just plain annoying on some platforms). A good example of this is the use of MySQL: very many people use it, but putting it into the GUI might simply give more people the opportunity to completely ruin their system because of LAN latency or a simple mistyped IP address. No specific conclusions, but it’s clearly a conversation that will continue to run as new features are introduced, tested, and, ultimately, mainstreamed. There’s room for improvement, however.

Next up, garbear came back on to talk about shaders - specifically, work that’s been underway for several years now to implement them in Retroplayer. For those who don’t know, a shader is a computer graphics technique (program, piece of code) that controls the appearance of 3D graphics elements - colour, lighting, texture, reflectivity, and so on. To have these obviously has a significant impact on how a game looks, from 8-bit blockiness to smooth realtime rendering (although they obviously can’t work miracles). There’s a major pull request that’s nearing completion, but there remain some final issues on OpenGL/OpenGL ES targets before it’s all ready.

As we finished that topic, well, once again, we went off on a tangent: the mere mention of GL/GLES sent us off down a whole different conversation, with lrusak, sarbes, chewitt and samnazarko weighing in - but one that’s far too granular to summarise here. Broadly, OpenGL ES is targeted at embedded systems, so offers a subset of functions compared to OpenGL, but that means a disparity in features and thus compatibility. However, OpenGL ES enjoys wider platform support, so standardising on one or the other has a lot of appeal (or, indeed, on Vulkan, but that’s an entirely different conversation).

The next topic was a long one, involved very many people, and came in multiple parts: a broad fly-past of open internal issues (we use GitHub issues to capture and track issues across multiple external and internal topic areas: bug tracking, for general attention of the Team, for the Board, for blog topics, for this conference, and so on). So, discussions in varying depth around (variously) auto-closure of stale issues and PRs; managing permission groups and access rights (enforcing least privilege in a maintainable way); cleaning out old/unsupported add-ons; cleanup of repositories and GitHub organisations; policies and processes around inactive (and, ultimately, retired) team members; how best to use AWS and Azure credit versus what we run on existing servers; potential to move to an open-source messaging platform; the global regulatory landscape.

And that’s just about a wrap for Day Two. There’s a little bit of both physical and virtual tidying up to do, but that’s very much an “us” problem. We have a series of breakouts scheduled (and, inevitably, spontaneously spawning) for tomorrow, so we’ll update you on those as and if relevant - so, maybe see you then!

DevCon 2025 - Tirana - Part I

Prof Yaffle — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 21:15:38 GMT

<tap, tap, tap> - Is this thing on? Yes, it is, and so it’s time to once again introduce the highlight of the Kodi year - friends and fellow travellers, welcome to DevCon 2025!

This year we’re coming to you from Tirana in Albania (or Tiranë in Shqipëri in the local language†). A country that, I suspect, most people know little about, Albania has a long and … bumpy history, mostly involving other countries and some less-than-friendly regimes: Romans (both western Roman and eastern Byzantine), Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, Italians, from imperial territory to independence, from international engagement to isolationist communism to modern democracy. Sitting astride both the Aegean and Ionic seas, the country now embraces the promise of full modernity and EU membership as it strives to turn its back on the darker chapters of recent history and take its rightful place in Europe.

As in previous years, we’re going to aim to do a daily update (content-dependent), so let’s see how it goes. Without further ado, then, let’s get straight into it with Day One.

We began with round-table introductions and a typical retrospective: reminiscences for older heads, background for newer ones. We’re coming up to a quarter of a century of XBMC/Kodi, and, as you’d expect, there’s now a significant story of how we got to where we are, and some of the main contributors and contributions along the way.

We continued with an update on the Foundation’s financial position from keithah. We’ve always been very transparent that we’re not a wealthy project, and we’ve never actively pursued financial gain for either Foundation or individuals. That hasn’t changed, although money is gradually getting tighter as e.g. major sponsors fall away, with limited opportunity to replace them in the current climate. We remain solvent, and can both pay our bills and invest in development hardware, server infrastructure and, yes, this conference, but we do need to generate new and more regular income to make sure that remains the case. In terms of priority, then, we wait to see if this is the last DevCon for a while.

Next up, we had a readout on the experience of our most recent release manager, garbear. Getting Kodi tagged, packaged and released on multiple platforms is a significant undertaking, so even point releases involve a good chunk of work. Even apparently minor changes involve merging new translations, for example, plus there are inevitable rule/eligibility checks on software stores and similar. Indeed, our most recent “Omega” 21.2 release actually included a complete update to the entire add-on ecosystem precisely because of translation issues, which means 100+ separate components needed to be built and released alongside the core Kodi application. Even that caused further ripple effects: we needed to update binary add-ons as well, which then, in turn, caused problems for existing 21.1 installations. This led straight into a more practical conversation, with garbear joined primarily by martijn, yol and lrusak to talk about how we could improve things: APIs, ABIs, links, scripts, dependencies, redistributables, SDKs, implications for different platforms - and, yes, much, much more about translations. Releasing new versions of Kodi is most certainly not a trivial task!

This conversation then segued into a long debate about build systems, and the complexity that Kodi brings: there are few, if any, multi-platform applications that use the same code base on quite so many target operating systems. If you think about most other applications that might be available on multiple platforms, the chances are that they use completely different code bases that are then built on specific tools to produce applications that might look similar, and might behave similarly, but are actually very different. Alternatively, you have very many applications that are basically web pages, rendered in a platform-specific wrapper - these can deliver a very consistent experience and rich multimedia, but in a very different way. Kodi doesn’t work like that: it’s a huge amount of C++ and other code that’s custom built to be as consistent as possible across platforms, and, while that resolves very many issues, it also creates some others at the bundling stage on some platforms.

A change of direction next: 78andyp joined to talk us through his recent work - and further plans - around Blu-ray support in Kodi. Currently, Kodi supports three disc playback modes: Kodi can show the Blu-ray menu, with all the navigation overhead; you can ask to play the main movie, and Kodi will just take a guess and play the longest media item on the disc, which may or may not be what you want; or you can go into file view, and wander around until you find that the main movie is labelled as item 636 out of a list of … well, lots. This is obviously all less than ideal, with further implications depending on whether it’s a multi-version disc, an episodic series disc, whether there are extras, and so on. Add to this the complexities of ISO versus physical disc, “playlists” with multiple episodes, or initial scraping versus play-time, and there’s clearly more to be done - and that’s the gauntlet picked up by 78andyp: to make playing a Blu-ray in Kodi as straightforward as playing a media file. This is very much a work-in-progress, but there’s a current 3,000-line pull request that aims to at least start this journey, addressing the simple file view for episodes at play-time. And, like so many things, this process is unveiling other side-quests on the way, ranging from NFO support through ranged episodes to library handling - for both Blu-rays and, potentially, DVDs. There’s clearly huge potential for much more to come, so watch this space, shiny disc fans!

(There was a sidebar conversation during this presentation in which ksooo raised some very valid questions about vision and the natural constraints on Kodi: what are the design principles we are using that ultimately drive what should and shouldn’t be included in Kodi versus, say, a media manager, and thus what are the dialogue boxes or other user interactions that are acceptable? Similarly, how effective could a heuristic be, when will it need user intervention, and what should that intervention look like? Does it need some external “priming”, or metadata information?).

And that’s it for Day One - it’s late, and dinner calls. We’ll be back tomorrow with more, so please, join us then!

† Fun fact: Albanian is the only surviving member of the Albanoid group of languages, and so stands alone, with no direct modern relatives. It’s the official language of Albania and Kosovo, one of the official languages in North Macedonia and Montenegro, and a widespread minority language in Italy, Croatia, Romania, Serbia and Greece. Add in the Albanian diaspora across the Americas, Europe and Oceania, and there are three or four times more native speakers worldwide than there are inhabitants of modern Albania - including singers Dua Lipa and Rita Ora.

Kodi 21.2 "Omega" - Release

Team Kodi — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 12:50:59 GMT

*UPDATE FOR WINDOWS USERS: If you’re experiencing crashes since this update was released, please read the note at the end of this post about updating your Visual C++ runtime.*

New Year, New Kodi? Not quite, but here we go with the next point release of the 21.x “Omega” series.

The usual story: bugfixes, not features. The full changelog can be found on GitHub, as usual.

Release Summary

Major user-facing changes include:

Library/Sources and Management

Fixed a bug that ignored images in the ...\season\.actors folder. The \season\.actors folders have been deprecated and all actors are saved in the \TV Show\.actors folder. (forum, PR)
Restore performance of movie addition to the library to v20 (Nexus) level (PR)
Fixed/improved playback from some UPnP server software (at least UMS and Gerbera. Some NAS UPnP servers are based on UMS under the covers). Playback starts faster and multiple videos can be played consecutively. (PR)
Preserve special characters in names of scanned or added movie extras (PR)
Replace context menu items ‘Set actor/artist thumb’ with ‘Choose art’ to make it possible again to add/and set other artwork, not only thumbnails (PR)
Fixed mark watched/unwatched operations missing in certain context menus (PR)
Honour importwatchedstate and importresumepoint settings from advancedsettings.xml (PR)

Video

Fixed HDR passthrough on video sources with partial or missing display metadata (only GL/GLES platforms) (PR)
Fixed HDR to SDR tone mapping on video sources with partial or missing display metadata (only GL/GLES platforms) (PR)
Fixed possible incorrect picture metadata if playing different HDR videos without stopping the previous one and the videos had different HDR metadata (all platforms) (PR)
Fixed on Blu-Ray discs some BD-j menu items not displaying correctly due to multi-thread timing issues (PR)
Fixed deletion of bookmarks in video if the video has also chapters (PR)

Music

Fixed an issue with the last track duration of some albums stored in mka containers (PR)

Plugins

Fixed missing context menu entries for plugin-provided items (PR)

Filesystem

Restored the ability of enter credentials when browsing SMB shares (only POSIX platforms) (PR)
Updated cURL to 8.10.0 to fix issues with FTP TLS sources (PR)

PVR

EPG search fixes (PR)
Fixed resume points for recordings not honoured (PR)
Fixed ‘User has no access / server’ error if broadcasts have been shifted (PR)
Fixed default select action ‘show info’ for PVR items (PR)

Skin/GUI

Added Donation tab in System Settings (PR)
In preparation for our next major release, we’ve been updating the translation strings in all 78 of our binary add-ons (audio, inputstream, peripheral, screensaver, vfs, visualisation…). These updates have now all been backported to this release, so there’s a bonus of a year’s worth of fixes and improvements here.

Android

Greatly improved joystick support on Android (PR)
Fixed possible crash when getInterfaceName method returns null (PR)
Fixed resuming paused media playback not working via play/pause media key press (PR)
Fixed black screen when resuming app from minimised state (PR)

Linux

Fixed memory corruption when high quality video scalers are used (PR)
Fixed possible infinite loop when using GBM and a DRM Atomic Commit fails (PR)
Fixed windowed Kodi becoming larger on every start when running on Wayland with a scale factor (PR)

OSX

Fixed crash when trying to detect optical media (PR)

Windows

Fixed the crash issue that occurred when accessing the computer using Remote Desktop Protocol (PR)
Fixed the ability of the built-in WOL feature to wake up servers (PR)
Fixed the potential crash occurred when the system contained environment variables name with a length of more than 64 characters (PR)
Fixed HDR feature did not work on Windows 11 24H2 under some circumstances (PR)
Improved support for WCG displays on Windows 11 24H2 (PR)

We always want to thank everyone who has helped us track down and fix any issues. We endeavour to minimise the issues everyone experiences, but with such a large project, and the fact everyone contributing to Kodi is a volunteer, issues and bugs are a part of life. If you happen to experience any bugs/issues, don’t hesitate to reach out on the forums, or raise an issue on GitHub.

Windows Store/Android Deployment

Note for Windows Users

Because we’re updating binary add-ons with this release, you’re likely to experience crashes due to version issues if you don’t also update the Visual C++ runtime. This is particularly likely if you stay on 21.1 (i.e. the add-ons get updated, but Kodi doesn’t).

The solution is to upgrade to 21.2 and thus install the Visual C++ runtime that comes with the 21.2 installer or, if you really want stay on 21.1, update the Visual C++ runtime externally from https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe.

The Kodi Foundation: Who We Are, What We Do

Team Kodi — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 19:38:20 GMT

So, a slightly different topic for a change.

We talk a lot about the Kodi software, its development and releases, and that’s fine, as that’s what we’re all about and that’s what everyone ultimately sees. However, we thought we’d change the subject a little and explore what goes on behind the scenes: how “Team Kodi” is structured, and what else is going on in the background in support of that glorious code.

The Kodi Foundation and the Board of Directors

Kodi has a legal personality. We’re incorporated in the US as the Kodi Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit - or a type of NGO, in common European parlance. This is the “company”, it’s the entity that receives donations, signs hosting agreements, protects our trademarks, and owns any assets and intellectual property. However, we don’t have any of the trappings of a regular company: we have no employees, minimal assets, and no property. We’re wholly run by volunteers and a few carefully-chosen outside agents for e.g. legal work.

The Kodi Foundation is then made up of members of Team Kodi. It’s not mandatory to join - you can be a Team member and not join - but it’s the Foundation members who get a vote on major decisions. Probably the most regular of those decisions is the appointment of our Board of Directors - again, Team members, all volunteers, each of whom serves a two-year term as part of a Board of five members. The Board then manages Kodi: funds, publicity, taxes, lawyers, copyright bodies, banks, sponsors, non-profit oversight, and so on. There’s also a whole raft of internal administrivia - member lists, permissions, access rights, what’s filed where, who’s responding to what, why are we getting these emails, no we don’t want your adverts.

As both a Team and as a Board, we hold regular Zoom meetings to discuss progress, schedules, and any related issues that may crop up from time to time. As you can imagine, this can be quite a challenge given the timezones we cover, so everything is available afterwards for Team members to catch up on.

The Greater Team Kodi

It’s not just paperwork, though. It’s easy to think of Kodi as a bunch of lines of code, hammered out in the small hours by pizza-fuelled developers, and that’s not necessarily too far wide of the mark in some ways. But there’s also so much more: even to maintain that code needs discipline, a release manager, code reviews, Github admin. We have people who look after build servers and DNS records, who administer our email and collaboration tools, who feed and water everything from backup servers to the server that hosts the forums: software upgrades, patches, hardware replacement, migrations. And we have people to write posts like this, to design our graphics for each release, to modify skins, to compile and build new releases.

Funding it All

As mentioned above, this is all voluntary: nobody at Kodi gets paid anything for what they do. We all do this as a hobby, because we enjoy it in some way. And what makes that possible is primarily you, our users.

We generate a few tens of thousands of dollars a year. Most of that comes directly from donations - that little orange button in the top right; some comes from merchandise sales such as T-shirts or royalties on branded Flirc goods; and the rest comes from corporate sponsorship, which is an ephemeral beast at best. You’ll perhaps notice that we’ve always steered clear of advertising, so there are no popups on this site, no banner ads, and nothing within the application itself: that’s very deliberate, and we work hard to keep it like that.

On that note, we’d like to give a huge shout out to Flirc right now, as they’ve just started selling a Raspberry Pi 5 branded Kodi case. This is the only company authorised to use our brand on a product, and the only company who gives us royalties: we get a small amount for every case sold. They’ve been consistently helping us out financially for the last few years and, without them, we would be attending many fewer conferences.

And where does the money go? We have hosting costs, professional service fees (lawyers, copyright specialists, accountants), banking fees. While we sometimes get sponsored hardware, we have to pay for servers, storage, bandwidth. If someone is working on a feature and they need a particular piece of hardware that we can’t get donated, we’ll buy them something (e.g. to assist with porting Kodi to a new platform). Perhaps our biggest costs are conferences: the Open Source world thrives on community, so we have tried to get people representing us at FOSDEM, Embedded Linux Conference, OSS Summit, SCALE, and the Open Source Leadership Summit - although the majority of funds goes to getting as many members as possible to attend our annual developer conference, Kodi Devcon.

We think we do pretty well on limited funds, and we’ve had some big donations in the past, but unfortunately those are drying up, so we’re starting to have to make hard decisions on not covering our volunteers costs to represent us at some of the conferences.

Once 2024 ends, we will publish a detailed financial blog post, outlining our expenses this past year, but we’d love help from readers and users like you!

What’s Needed

More hosting is always appreciated. We get by nearly entirely from free hosting and can’t thank our sponsors such as OSUOSL and Leaseweb enough, but can always use more diversity.
We always need volunteers to work on stuff! Social Media and someone to manage our store are two that come to mind, but platform-specific development experience (e.g. Android) is always good.
Sponsorship! if you think you have a good fit for a sponsor who aligns with our interests, please, reach out!
If you have any corporate matching, Kodi is registered as a corporate nonprofit beneficiary with the Benevity platform.
And lastly, monetary donations go a long way too. As stated, we are a 501(c)(3), so these donations are tax deductible in the US. If you have a few dollars, pounds, euros or equivalent going spare, you can really help us out. Thank you!

We always want to keep some money in the bank, and we have a rule: we need to be able to cover the next Devcon before we hold this one and, unfortunately, 2025 may be the last year for a couple years at the current rate of donations. We spend less than US$30k for the entire event, including flying our team from around the world to attend plus all hotel/food/conference room costs, but our current finances just won’t support this after next year’s conference unless something changes, such as a new sponsor (or the RPi5 case becomes exceedingly popular and sells out!).

Thank you very much in advance for anything you can do to help.

— Team Kodi

Flirc Case for Raspberry Pi 5 - Kodi Edition

Team Flirc — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 11:14:39 GMT

Team Flirc and Team Kodi are thrilled to introduce the newly designed Flirc Raspberry Pi 5 Case, Kodi Edition. Available now!

Our journey began with a host of ideas that we transformed into a crowdsourcing poll on the Kodi forums. The community chose from six designs, and we loved seeing your preferences and hearing your feedback. We’re excited to continue this collaborative approach because, just as Kodi is community-driven, so should its official case be.

With only about 2,000 cases available, this is a truly limited edition. Once sold out, we won’t produce more. Instead, every quarter, we’ll engage with the community again, allowing you to submit and vote on new ideas for another limited run.

With each purchase, you’re helping fund the Kodi team’s ongoing development and innovation.

On top of our Black Friday - Cyber Monday deals, enjoy an extra 10-15% off when you purchase a Kodi Edition Raspberry Pi 5 case, which can be used on our Flirc USB or Skip 1s Universal Remote.

If you want to see more, check out the YouTube video below, or just skip the line and head straight over to the Flirc store to grab one!

A heartfelt thanks to the Kodi Team, our loyal customers, community members, and everyone who contributed to the design.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Kodi 21.1 "Omega" - Release

Team Kodi — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 11:51:22 GMT

Okay, a late announcement - apologies, you can blame the summer holiday season. Or, if it’s easier, you can just blame me as the bloke with the keyboard, that works equally well. Either way, many of you will already have noticed this, but, in case you haven’t …

Team Kodi is here with the first point release of the 21.x “Omega” series.

A range of bugfixes have been collected since the original release of Omega 21.0. Rather than list them all here, you can see the full changelog on Github, as usual.

As this is a point release, there are no major changes since the previous version, and you should be fine to install this straight over the top of any existing Kodi 21.0 installation - indeed, this will happen, and probably already has happened, automatically on many platforms. However, as for all software installations, back up your userdata beforehand if you’ve any doubts or have anything you can’t afford to lose (and definitely do this if you’re going for a major version upgrade).

Android Deployment

We always do what’s known as a “staged” deployment roll out for Android. So if you didn’t receive the update immediately, it should have come through over the following week or so, and rollout should now be complete.

Names Have Power

Prof Yaffle — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 12:52:30 GMT

This is a little later in the development cycle than would normally be the case, but I’m sure you’ll understand why.

It’s traditional, as we move towards the release of a new version of Kodi, to begin the process of naming what will become its successor. In recent years, “Leia” gave way to “Matrix”, which moved aside for “Nexus”, and then on to our current version, “Omega”. There’s a clue there to the pattern, so P-something it is.

Our normal process would be to ask the forums and team for suggestions, edit these down to a shortlist, and then run an internal poll and choose a winner. However, the shortlisting was done a little quickly this time, and we ended up picking a P-name that was already in use for a problematic add-on (arrr, shiver me timbers, and all that - absolutely not a connection we’d wish to make). The obvious solution was to skip that one, then, and move to the second choice - except that turned out to be the name of a legitimate streaming service. And the third? Another problematic add-on.

As the team deliberated the need for another poll, we heard sad news about a colleague and team member whose contributions to Kodi have been so immensely valuable. His death at such a young age gave everyone pause, and with his name just-so-happening to begin with exactly the right letter, it seemed fitting to mark his passing with more than just a blog post.

So with muted fanfare, we memorialise our good friend, and continue development towards Kodi v22, “Piers”.

You will, of course, hear more about this as the development branch takes shape, and you can follow development on GitHub as you wish.

A Tribute to Estuary Developer and Kodi Team Member, Piers

Natethomas — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 18:25:04 GMT

In 2015, Kodi’s default theme Confluence was growing long in the tooth. Most of the really exciting skins from that time accomplished far more, and Confluence was ultimately a 2009 update to an existing skin called MediaStream that was itself several years old. It was time for Confluence to retire. We needed something new that adhered to the UX best practices of the time.

I proposed some wireframes based on Google’s Material Design that were pretty vague, but I hoped would be enough to get us started. Almost immediately, members of our team of skilled skinners (Phil65 and Piers) jumped on the task. I made my initial suggestion early on the 17th of June, and Piers had already mocked up a complete home page later that day. His post at that time introducing the mockup had me chuckling for days. Once an idea struck him, the guy worked tirelessly to see it through.

By the 18th, a day later, Piers’ mockup was revamped and looked remarkably complete. Unfortunately, those early designs have been lost to the internet gods, but we do still have a screenshot of the first alpha created in August that remained quite true to those early mockups.

By September, Estuary was pretty well complete with two primary themes, the 3D-styled curial and the flat style which remains the default to this day. Piers and Phil65, along with several other skinners, notably BigNoid, had introduced a variety of features including the ability to select different color styles, like pink. The team also created a separate second skin designed specifically to work for mobile devices.

In 2016, these skins were officially released with Kodi 17 to universal praise within the community (for those interested in history, you can find the original blog post here). The work done by Piers and the team on UX/UI in 2015 and 2016 cannot be understated. They developed a lasting and original skin that remains in use to this very day.

We recently learned that Piers passed away. He was 37. He will be missed by those of us who worked with him on this project. We cannot emphasize enough his contribution to software seen and used by millions of people worldwide.

Thank you for everything, Piers.

The Sun Sets on Python 2

Team Kodi — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 17:56:40 GMT

Recently, Team Kodi proudly released Kodi v21 “Omega”, the latest major release of our popular media centre software.

Our longevity and popularity means that Kodi is installed on literally millions of devices worldwide. For a range of reasons, not all of them are capable of supporting the newer releases; we do, however, try to maintain as much support as we can for the older releases, with our target being support for the previous two versions before the current one. The release of Omega thus moves Kodi Leia out of active support.

The final version of Kodi Leia (v18.9) was released in October 2020. Leia was also noteworthy as being the final version which made use of the Python 2 language, with Kodi Matrix and beyond using the newer Python 3. That move was made due to Python 2 being marked as end-of-life on 1st January 2020 by its authors, who now no longer support it and so it does not receive any updates or security patches. Python 3 is fully supported and updated, but Python 3 code is not directly compatible with Python 2.

This means that, as Kodi Leia moves out of support, so does Python 2 for Kodi. As a result, we will no longer be accepting any updates for Python 2 addons into our repository, and the Leia repo will be frozen. Any Leia installation will still be able to access the repo, but addon updates will only be accepted in Python 3, with the effect that they can only be run on Kodi Matrix or later. This will free up the Team Kodi volunteers who review addon submissions to focus entirely on Python 3 addons, making reviews simpler and faster and so minimising the delays between submission and release of acceptable addons into the repo.

This also means that older scrapers written in XML or Python 2 will not get any updates, so any changes made on the source database sites which break them will render them permanently broken. Most of these scrapers are long unsupported anyway, but as Leia and older versions are now end-of-life then the only solution will be to update to a newer version of Kodi using the supported Python 3 scrapers.

We thus bid a grateful farewell to Python 2, and put our focus now on updating and improving Kodi for the future.

Kodi 21.0 "Omega" - Release

Team Kodi — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 16:13:41 GMT

It’s time! We are very pleased to present the latest and greatest release of Kodi, v21.0 “Omega”.

With this release we have seen over 3,750 commits since v20.0 “Nexus” was available to the world on January 15th, 2023. As always, this has been a huge effort from many contributors, testers and supporters. Thanks go out to our team members, plus everyone in our community who sent in a pull request, tested and gave feedback, or provided support to users on the forum. We always appreciate your contribution to making Kodi better.

Let’s review some of the changes you can expect:

Major Features

FFmpeg 6

Kodi relies significantly on FFmpeg to do a lot of heavy lifting for us. Many developers have contributed to upgrading the project to make use of the newer FFmpeg releases over the past 15 months, initially starting with targeting FFmpeg 5, but later updating to FFmpeg 6. We are always greatly appreciative of the work of all of the Open Source software projects that we rely on to bring you Kodi.

DolbyVision On-the-Fly Profile Conversion

For our Android users, a fantastic contribution from quietvoid allows users to convert some less well-supported DV profile types to more well-supported profiles.

macOS Now Uses “Native” Windowing

Another change that has been years in the making. This was started by some amazing developers many years ago, and we have now been able to finally remove the last remnants of SDL library usage in Kodi. We now use native implementations for window displays on the Apple macOS platform.

A New Platform: webOS

A new platform can now run Kodi natively: a port to LG webOS TVs has been worked out by some amazing developers who have reverse engineered huge amounts of the webOS media pipelines. One of our newest team members, sundermann, has helped shepherd our newest supported platform, to extend the reach of Kodi to even more devices.

In-game Player Viewer

Controller configuration for games gets a little better in v21: a window has been added in-game to view which game port each player’s controller is currently connected to.

Behind the Scenes

A large majority of changes are “under the hood” and invisible to users but improve the stability, performance, and safety of Kodi: API changes have been made to evolve Python and binary add-ons and bring new skinning features; there are updates to Kodi dependencies on most if not all Kodi platforms; fixes from regular use of code static-analysis tools, database migration fixes for a smoother update … and lots more.

There are too many individual changes to detail everything. If you would like to know more, please look back through the Omega Alpha to RC2 release announcements and review the GitHub changelog here.

Time doesn’t stand still, and we have already branched Kodi v22 “P*” for development. Thank you again for your continued support as we continue to make Kodi great!

Help Wanted!

If you experience any issues or find any remaining bugs, please post in the General Support section of our forum. If you have fixes for issues please submit a pull request with your changes to our master branch on GitHub. We also welcome users who want to help answer questions in the forum or write articles for the wiki.

Donate

To show support and appreciation for Kodi, please consider making a donation or purchasing merchandise such as a T-shirt or Raspberry Pi case. Your donations are greatly appreciated and help us to function, covering operating expenses, hardware and software licences for developers, and legal fees, as well as paying for team members to attend industry/FLOSS events and our annual conference.

Availability

Kodi 21.0 “Omega” is being pushed to the usual channels right now, both our own download pages and various app stores/repositories, so should be with your devices shortly. It’s worth noting that, for the first time in a while, we’ve cleared all known blockers, so all supported platforms will be updated just as soon as the various app stores process things.

If you are an Android user and wish to update to Kodi 21.0 as soon as possible, you can either sideload, or join the Google Play - Kodi testing track which will get the release submitted more quickly. The “open” release will be promoted from the testing track in a week or two. We strongly advise Android users who use alternative skins to follow up with their skin developer, or to disable auto update before this time period, as not every skin will yet have been updated.

Over a Year Late, A Dollar Short - More Than Two Decades of Kodi!

Keith Herrington — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 17:13:57 GMT

Hi, everyone - I’m Keith, and while I now find myself President of the Kodi Foundation, my initial involvement with Kodi goes way back, as a humble user. Since our 20th anniversary came and went, I’ve been meaning to write a bit of a look back on how we got here - how I got here. This is the story of my - and the project’s - journey.

In the Beginning…

In 2002, a couple guys saw the potential of being able to watch media on their own terms, through what was a new type of device: a “connected” TV device. They wanted to bring many things you’d traditionally need a computer for to the living room, operating it from the couch without needing a keyboard or mouse, controlling events through what they called a 10 foot interface because, well, it was an interface you could sit 10 feet away from.

While special-purpose devices already existed, they usually were things like DVD players, and they weren’t “connected” to anything else or even had the ability to hook up to a network. Indeed, even the TiVo, one of the most impressive devices of the time, lacked an Ethernet port. One of the creators of Samba, an open-source interoperability application to share files between Linux and Windows, eventually figured out how to add a network port to a TiVo; however, even though it was the first mass marketed consumer Linux-based appliance, it was still very much a closed, walled garden.

The Xbox changed all that. In 2001, Microsoft released their first console, leveraging their work on x86 platforms to build out a version of Windows specialized for running games. The familiarity allowed game developers to easily port to the new gaming console; the fact that Microsoft sold them at a loss, knowing they would make it back in game sales, ensured rapid consumer adoption. Luckily for the hackers out there, there were more similarities than differences when compared to something they were already very familiar with: the standard Windows personal computer. Very quickly, folks like Bunnie figured out ways around the security, achieving the holy grail in record time for a console: the ability to run untrusted code.

Long before we had the Raspberry Pi, OpenWrt routers and other tinkerer’s dream “open” environments, Xbox hacking quickly became the fastest route to general-purpose, connected computing. The availability of powerful, affordable, standardized hardware enabled an entire community of hackers wanting to break out of Microsoft’s walled garden and run whatever code they wanted on their Xbox. Emulation, or the ability to trick old games such as NES and Sega Genesis into believing the Xbox is the same hardware, was one of the first big use cases, since we now had something powerful enough that hooked up to a regular TV and offered a standard controller.

XBMC is Born

While many folk worked on getting Linux and various other things running, the project that attracted me the most was Xbox Media Player. This brought the ability to play compressed media to the Xbox: up until this point, only a computer could play these files, and if you were one of the those super early adopters who had network cables strung across your house, you could now even stream it over the network or the Internet (which was definitely not fast enough for video… yet!).

XBMP came out in 2002 as the convergence of two separate closed source apps natively written with the Microsoft Xbox Development Kit by d7o3g4q (a.k.a. duo) and RUNTiME. As many at the time pointed out, since it was leveraging GPL code, it likely needed to be open source. At the same time, another developer - Frodo - had created YAMP as “Yet Another Media Player”; when these projects also converged at the end of 2002, Xbox Media Center, or XBMC, was born. While the initial beta was closed source, the developers quickly open sourced it and it’s been open source ever since.

XBMC v2, released September 2006

(You can even have a read of the original manual if you like!)

I was a dedicated Xbox user at the time, for everything besides gaming. I diligently connected to #xbins on EFnet to find the latest binary release and watched in awe the quick iteration these folks were doing, adding so many incredible features, even supporting things like CD+G for Karaoke. You have to realise how groundbreaking a library mode was, allowing you to peruse your stored media collection while everyone else - even Netflix - was still renting DVDs by post or picking them up in strip mall stores.

The developers themselves deserve a ton of recognition: their tireless pursuit of the best media experience, one that was infinitely customizable and powerful and something they were proud of. While most have moved on to other things, a few, like spiff, remain around since those early days, and are still here to let others know why certain things are why they are and even to still occasionally contribute code.

Success Has Many Parents

But these folks did not do this in a vacuum: as the saying goes, “it takes a village”. FFmpeg, for example, being the Internet’s Swiss Army knife for video, handles so much of the core rendering and playback. In developer parlance, we call these ‘dependencies’ but I prefer to think of these types of libraries as the backbone. Without the ability to stand on the shoulder of these mammoth libraries, XBMC devs would never have been able to focus so much on the skinning and user experience. While XBMC was initially heavily based on mplayer, which is now known as mpv, it has evolved into being closely tied to FFmpeg.

XBMC v9 “Babylon”, released May 2009

There are also countless other contributors - to the code, artwork, forum, and beyond - who absolutely have to be acknowledged. It’s been a long journey from those early applications thru XBMP and XBMC to today’s Kodi, but it’s clear that the application wouldn’t be what it is without the add-on ecosystem, translators, community moderators, volunteer artists, system admins, database admins, and many more.

And while devs have came and gone, the project has lived on, continuing to expand to every major platform it possibly can, even to a couple of smart TVs now. Highly unusual - maybe unique - as an open-source application that started on a Microsoft product before spreading further to so many other, disparate platforms, Kodi has now even come full circle to be back in the Xbox Store (although, somewhat ironically, Microsoft platforms have become increasingly challenging for us because we lack current developer knowledge). We still try to bring all the functionality we can to every platform we can: you’ve got a weird mod file, from your demoscene days? Still got a pile of FLVs? We got you. What about wanting to stream Widevine-enabled Internet content with an open-source project? Yeah, we see you and we care.

So, Here We Are

One of the parts that some don’t realize is since our initial development, we’ve always been a monolithic application, meaning the entire codebase must be ported to the desired platform. I’ve said we’re the “largest open-source multimedia project” for years, half-jokingly, but I mean this by the literal lines of code that it takes to run it.

XBMC v10 “Dharma”, released December 2010

And we’ve stayed volunteer. As a consumer-oriented open-source project, no company has ever sponsored more than a port or a feature; indeed, since the nonprofit foundation behind it isn’t setup to be engaged, at worst companies have simply given some money to an individual to work on a feature. Even this is definitely not the norm: 99.9% of Kodi has been built out of passion and love for multimedia and the desire to have an open-source platform for which people can decide the look and feel and customize to their liking, in both hardware and software terms.

I do have to call out our longest and biggest sponsor and partner, Flirc: their support with this project has been unwavering.

This is truly software on your own terms, and to me, is the essence of open source.

Wrapping it All Up

Sorry this became so wordy, but I’ve been wanting to write a “20 year blog post” for so long, and it’s now been nearly 22 years since XBMP binaries first became available. Time flies. I hope this blog helped you stop for a moment and marvel at how far we’ve come, even if you’ve only been a user since we’ve been called Kodi: the developers see themselves in you and you’re the reason why we’ve kept hacking on this project for so long.

So, let’s raise our glasses for over 20 years, and, yes, we still have MANY lines of original, first generation code! We have to thank everyone who’s been involved and supported us: everyone who submitted a pull request or posted a message on the forum, all the devs who have tirelessly worked on the ‘dependency’ libraries that mean so much to us, and especially the official Team XBMC and Kodi Foundation developers. You folks, who continue to iterate, tweak and build the future of this platform, enable millions to consume media without having to care about how it works and why.

XBMC v13 “Gotham”, released May 2014

And while you’re here, we made a T-shirt to commemorate this moment! It (hopefully) has every team member on it. As we said, we’re volunteers, and the only money our non-profit receives is thru donations, merchandise and the only licensed product we’ve ever been a part of, Flirc’s Kodi Raspberry Pi case.

Take your pick from a dark T-shirt, a light T-shirt, a pillow or something else from the whole store.

Please, purchase something, and help us to keep thriving for the next 20 years; I personally plan our Devcons, and we might not be able to get together in 2025 without help from people like you, so anything you can do to help, we really appreciate it.

Oh, and while I’m asking: if anyone knows any non profit open source lawyers that are prepared to help us with things like trademark registration and maintenance of the Foundation, please send them our way! Legal-at-kodi-dot-tv.

Thanks again. I have no idea what the next 20 years will bring, or whether I will personally still be involved, but, for as long as developers and users are still interested, I know we’ll all try our best to support it.

Keith Herrington
President, Kodi Foundation

(There’s some further history here and here, if you’re interested).