Build/Dependencies

• A number of changes to the cmake build system have been made. These will be mostly invisible to users, but the intention is to modernise our cmake usage to prepare us for the future more easily.
• The cmake build system, when targeting Multi Config Generators (VS/Xcode), will now create a full complete build directory to allow a Kodi executable to be run immediately without the direct use of an IDE like VS. This is also the start to allow us to build dependencies for Windows for shared libraries, and be able to package them correctly.
• A number of fixes to allow building with GCC13 have been made. This mostly involved the transitive inclusion of headers in system headers being removed/changed. The fixes have been to explicitly include those headers in our code.

Estuary, Estouchy

• Retire Favourites dialog, use Favourites window instead (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23861).

Favourites

• Add selected items of the target to favourite's context menu (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23895).
• Fix crash on moving items in favourites widget and favourites window (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23946).

General

• A bug was recently introduced that led to external subtitle entries becoming unavailable on streamdetails. This was fixed in https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23835.
• A fix to allow .strm files to properly use resume points was made by @Acidzero2020.
• An improvement to the Event Log "toast" notifications has been made by @DaVukovic to provide more meaningful information when an item fails to scrape TV Shows.

Input

• A fix to allow Python addons to correctly handle custom controller button inputs was made by @icr8ions. This allows addons like the Keymap Editor to correctly recognise and handle actions from custom controllers (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23789).

Music

• A PR that extends the Python 'generic artist' scraper to fetch the associated YouTube video links for an artist from theaudiodb, and then match them up to songs already scanned into the user's music library. This allows skins to then display links to the corresponding song video. More information can be see in the PR from @the-black-eagle (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/22654).

Player

• Updated some internal constants to handle better very high bit rate streams (maximums of UHD Blu-Ray at least - 144 Mbit/s) (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23883).

Platform Specifics

Android:

• A fix to actually package themes for skins like Estuary/Estouchy was made. This was found by accident, and dates way back to the implementation of our Android platform (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23782).
• @joseluismarti continues his improvement of our Android code. This time he has updated some code to use Android-provided values rather than a manually-curated list of values. (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23769).
• A workaround for an Amlogic BSP audio bug that affects many platforms, even modern Google devices (more information here, fixed in https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/commit/be049ba900df39b9f2cef820a19088f8aa1ba7d2).

FreeBSD

• We don't have too many improvements to our FreeBSD port, however @lrusak has brought FreeBSD in line with Linux with its usage of the command line argument --audio-backend (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23886).

Linux:

• A fix for a crash with Pipewire was contributed by @dobo90.
• @lrusak has implemented a command line switch (--gl-interface=<interface>) to replace the old environment variable usage of KODI_GL_INTERFACE (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23907).
• Kodi's usage of the system ping utility has been replaced with an internal implementation (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23870).
• DRMPrime has had a check based on pitch value removed as it was causing failures with some formats, like single plane and/or compressed ones, where the pitch can be 0 and therefore it has no meaning. Thanks @jernejsk (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23889).

macOS:

• SDL windowing while not enabled by default since Alpha1 (in favour of native windowing) was still a possible build compile switch. It has finally been removed in Beta 1 (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/22990).
• Kodi now relies on an external library, smctemp, to display the CPU and GPU sensor values - this being valid for either x86 or Apple Silicon (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23770).
• Network info subsystem was improved avoiding the execution of external commands to obtain the current gateway and DNS server list (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23724).
• Improvements to input, e.g. the enter keyboard key was not being recognised (only key return) (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23860).

webOS

• @quietvoid has contributed a fix to allow webOS to play back AV1 DolbyVision files on supported devices (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23771).
• Support to allow webOS to to suspend to background rather than exit was made by @sundermann (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23684).
• With the support to suspend/minimise for webOS, behaviour to pause/resume media playback when Kodi is minimised/restored has been implemented by @sundermann.
• Initial support for webOS 4 devices has been implemented by @mariotaku.

Windows:

• Fixed Windows 11 refresh rate switching (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23766).
• Improved the vsync detection used by "Sync playback to display" mode (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23893). Breaks compatibility with Windows 7 (which is not supported in v21).

PVR

• Fix 'switch to previous channel' not working if it is in another group than the currently playing channel (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23932).
• Fix Live TV - Randomly spinner stays forever although channel is playing fine (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23844).
• Skinning@DeltaMikeCharlie has provided a way for skinners to use a ParentalRatingCode info label (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23586).
• Infolabels for video width and height have been added by @graham8 (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23850).

Videos

• Respect default select action setting at more places - Home screen widgets, PVR recordings window, Favourites window (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23848 , https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23857).
• Add default play action setting to control resume behaviour when starting playback of videos (xhttps://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23863).
• Fix play/resume of BD and DVD disc images not working from Home screen widgets (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23905).
• Automatic video rotation from metadata was fixed (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23832).
• Teletext language codes sometimes were not persisted correctly in the teletext browser (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23890).
• Improvements to the teletext browser window (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23896).
• EDL files are now valid even if they are not on the same subnet of the Kodi host - valid across all private subnet ranges (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23836).
• @joseluismarti also contributed outside of his usual Android improvements with a fix for a crash when scan to library on a directory contained new movies (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23767).

Estuary

• A change to Estuary to add "more..." to size-limited lists has been made by @ksooo. The effect of this can be seen in homescreen widgets that have more than 15 items.
• A number of changes to support video information for Movie Sets and TV Seasons has been made.

FFmpeg

• @popcornmix has made several fixes to our FFmpeg library usage. This has gone through several iterations now, and has affected seeking and playback to various degrees. Hopefully, the last of these regressions has now been squashed, but please do let us know if you experience any further regressions around playback using FFmpeg.

Filesystem

• @thexai has changed the chunk size of data requests for local media, increasing it 64kb to improve data throughput.

Games

• @garbear continues to improve the gaming interface of Kodi. Changes around player management/assignment have been made in https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23548. Have a read of that PR for more details/info.

General

• @ksooo has continued his whack-a-mole approach with issues regarding menu usage across the Kodi codebase. A fix for no information dialog for music videos, "Local art" missing for the art selection dialog, and further art dialog selection issues are amongst some of the latest fixes.
• TV Shows/Seasons/Movie sets/Recording folders now expose their 'in progress' state via LISTITEM_IS_RESUMABLE.
• The content of the refresh progress dialog has been improved a bit to be more informative for the user - for example, to display the current season and episode being refreshed.
• @repojohnray has had a (lingering) PR merged that fixes a memory leak in context menus.
• Some improvements and optimisations have been made by @neo1973 . This affects several areas (database and curl usage), and every performance fix is greatly appreciated.
• @rmrector has been digging into the image usage of Kodi (caching, allow remote viewing of images without having been displayed in Kodi, preloading of images and general streamlining of the API), and has made several improvements leading to more hotly-anticipated changes to come in the future.

Platform Specifics

Android:

• @quietvoid has had a PR merged that enables the ability to convert some Dolby Vision media types to more common types to allow playback. A forum thread has been around for testing that can explain the benefits a little better than this blog editor, so head there for some info and any feedback/support around the feature: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=371557.
• @fritsch has once again delved into our Audio Engine to fix a regression for Amazon FireTV 4K users: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23687.
• @joseluismarti has further updated some Android dependencies and fixed/modernised areas of our Android API usage.

Linux:

• Support for cpu_thermal hwmon has been added. This enables devices like the Raspberry Pi to report CPU temperatures without the use of external scripts (as have been common in projects like LibreELEC).
• @smp79 submitted a fix for VAAPI VP9 Profile 2 playback.

macOS:

• @kambala-decapitator has fixed a crash in the SDL versions of Kodi when pressing the Caps-Lock key. This did not affect the "native windowing" version of Kodi we have migrated to for v21 nightlies, however if you are building for x86_64 intel Macs then this should make using that key less troublesome.
• @enen92 continues his work on improving Kodi for macOS. Network System info has been tackled to improve its speed, and more accurately represent network information like DNS servers used.
• macOS temperature information is currently not supported on Apple Silicon devices due to our usage of a library that does not support them. @enen92 has made a change to report N/A instead of 0.0 for CPU/GPU temperatures.
• Media keys are now supported on macOS.
• Some improvements for moving the Kodi app window from high-DPI screens with differing refresh rates.
• macOS releases are now defaulting to the "native windowing" system.

webOS

• @sundermann has continued with further improvements to the webOS port, most notably around passthrough and video decoding.

Windows:

• A PR intended to fix an issue around the Windows platform regularly losing track of the audio output device has been merged by @thexai. This hopefully makes Windows audio outputs more robust to situations where driver updates may change naming.
• @CrystalP has been contributing a number of fixes/improvements particularly aimed at Windows. These include a fix for refresh rate switching for Intel and Nvidia graphics cards that was accidentally broken by a fix aimed at AMD cards.
• More improvements to the recently add Video Super Resolution implementation have been made.

PVR

• A first time contributor @ivanllc has had a PR merged to add a "2 minute" option to the padding timer for PVR recordings.
• @ksooo continues to improve the Kodi PVR system. A number of changes were made, including fixes and tidy ups from static analysis tools (cppcheck and clang-tidy).
• Fixed a long-standing bug with subtitle selection not being preserved upon channel playback restart.

Python

• Changes made to support building Kodi when using Python 3.12.
• Python invoker now passes sys.argv arguments in a logical order to Python addons thanks to @scott967.

Skinning

• a change by @smfontes to allow loading of font sets defined in a skins/fonts folder: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/22993.

Subtitles

• Support for .ttc font collections has been added.

Video

• TV show groups (seasons, movie sets, PVR recording folders) with at least one started element (episodes, movies, recordings) but no completely watched ones are now considered as 'in progress' and they, for example, now appear in the respective "In progress" GUI elements like widgets and video windows.
• Fixed play counts (watched state) and last played date of episodes and movies not being preserved on internet update.
• Default select action for videos fixed.

VideoPlayer

• @alanswanson has provided a change to use the FFmpeg software deinterlacer from yadiff to bwdif. This is said to have fairly significant performance improvements over the old interlacing method.

Build/Dependencies

• Build support for GCC13 has been fixed by some users. This allows Kodi to be built on newer toolchains that refactored some header inclusions.
• Some general version bumps have been made for an assortment of dependencies for Android/Apple/CI platforms. Thanks @craigcarnell, @fuzzard.
• @lrusak has endeavoured to improve the way some of the Android/Apple/CI dependency systems work and handle different states.
• @Rechi has fixed a few cmake deprecations and pkgconfig detection issues.

Documentation

• Some new contributors noted some of our contributing guideline documentation was lacking. A few people have helped contribute to hopefully make them more helpful/informative.
• @fixthething has updated some of the Ubuntu build documentation to reflect some modern package names used in more recent Ubuntu versions.

FFmpeg

• Use upstream FFmpeg. This is a big achievement and allows easier FFmpeg updates in the future.
• Update to version 6.0. This puts us inline with the latest FFmpeg release. Compatibility with 5.1.x has been retained for Linux distro support.

Filesystem

• With the introduction of NFSv4 support, a number of issues were quickly discovered by users. @thexai has fixed a many of these, such as timeouts/chunk size defaults for NFSv4.

General

• @repojonray has provided a number of general fixes/improvements to various areas to address e.g. memory leaks and performance improvements.
• Modernisation of several areas of Kodi have been undertaken by a number of developers. A lot of this work will go unseen by users, however it's helping to make Kodi's huge amount of code more maintainable for the future. @lrusak, @neo1973 , @repojohnray, @enen92, @Rechi .
• Add setting to disable screensaver while playing audio.
• @DeltaMikeCharlie has contributed some improvements to the UX regarding date format options.

Games

• Improvements are continually being made to the Retroplayer ecoystem by several devs/users. Thanks to @KOPRajs, @garbear .

JSON-RPC

• genre has been added to the Video.Fields.Episodes field.

Music

• Add support for reading (and writing) M3U8 playlist files. This provides support for non-ASCII characters in the playlist files (UTF-8 character support).

Platform Specifics

Android:

• Improved Dolby Vision detection and compatibility: implemented support of DV in MKV containers, better handling of different DV profiles with fallback to HDR10 when is possible and display is not DV capable. For some devices, we can now also support hardware tone mapping DV profiles 4, 5 to SDR. Supported profiles vary on different Android devices: for example, the 2019 Shield supports profiles 4, 5, 7, 8 in DV and fallback to HDR10 (profiles 7, 8) but not HW tone mapping to SDR. Similarly, the Fire TV Stick doesn't supports profile 7 although it does support HW tone mapping of profile 5 to SDR (profiles 4, 5, 8 are supported with DV display).
• Implemented minimise shutdown function in Power Saving settings.
• Multiple small internal improvements and use of newer Android APIs to replace deprecated ones.
• @joseluismarti is slowly improving/updating a number of Android-specific features that enable the project to stay up to date with Google Play Store submission requirements.

iOS/TVOS:

• Support for Channel Up/Down keys when using the iPhone Apple TV Remote app connected to an Apple TV has been added.

Linux:

• Pipewire:
• Fix implementation to work properly with AudioEngine.
• Add support for passthrough formats. This includes HD audio formats like DTS-HD and TrueHD.
• GBM:
• Add support for libdisplay-info to help parse EDID information and determine display capabilities.

macOS:

• @enen92 has been slowly but surely improving lots of the macOS native windowing implementation (mouse, resizing, menu bar, shortcut key handling, etc.) that was introduced in Nexus. The official macOS builds do not use this functionality at this point, but with enen92's work, we are inching closer to using it as our default for v21.
• macOS CD/DVD drive handling has been fixed. This also allows M1-based machines to read disks correctly.

Windows:

• Minimum Windows supported version has been raised to Windows 8.1.
• If they're available, we will now use displays' friendly names in settings (e.g. "LG TV #1").
• Added a setting to use the Windows HDR/SDR brightness balance setting for GUI and subtitles when the display is in HDR PQ mode, and also improved the curve of internal method GUI SDR max peak luminance.
• Improved read performance over SMB in some special cases, e.g. playing full Blu-ray folders.
• Improved graphics compatibility and fallback to enable running in some limited VM hardware (Hyper-V) even without video decoding support.
• Various improvements in DXVA render method to avoid incompatibilities in old hardware or Windows 8, especially in the case of sources with BT.2020 colour space.
• Implemented support for DXVA2 AV1 hardware video decoding 8-bit and 10-bit.
• Specific SDK requirements for building UWP packages have been removed to allow the use of newer SDKs from Visual Studio.

Picture

• Fix security issues discovered regarding image EXIF metadata. Further fixes were also backported from the upstream EXIF data parsing library that is in use in Kodi.

PVR

• Add possibility to sort channel groups to your liking.

Settings

• Some fixes to regressions in Settings visibility have been made.

Subtitles:

• The display of MKV files containing text subtitle entries without the duration set on the Matroska block were fixed, retaining Kodi v19 behaviour. This includes the teletext autoconversion to srt done in PVR backends (e.g. tvheadend).
• Fixed setting of subtitle offset when auto-close video OSD is set.
• @CastagnaIT has continued to support/fix issues with the new subtitle system as they are reported.

UPnP:

• Improved compatibility with official smart TV applications when displaying and browsing served UPnP Kodi libraries.
• Fix artwork when playing/refreshing UPnP items.

Audio

• @fritsch has been working feverishly on Android-related audio issues over the past couple of months, and in combination with @thexai has introduced an algorithm to look to overcome some audio issues particularly aimed at Android devices. A summary is:
• Algorithm runs for 30 seconds to learn what is going on: during this time no corrections are done, but the internal m_disconAdjustTimeMs is updated to a new value whenever when the sync error is found to increase. After 30 seconds the learning stops and the final m_disconAdjustTimeMs is set as: m_disconAdjustTimeMs * 1.15 + 5.0.
• With firmware specialities for AudioTrack Write behaviour now kind of "well known" the systematic issue can be worked around easily. This helps users on affected system to not have to create an advancedsettings.xml for a manual fix.

DVD

• Playback of DVD folder structures over network sources (e.g. SMB/NFS/HTTP, etc.) has been fixed.

Filesystems

• A fix in Samba was made that "corrected" a long-standing assumption - it turns out that documentation doesn't always match code implementation. We now handle both the old Samba implementation and the new "correct" implementation.
• Further improvements to the new NFS4 implementation have been made by @thexai . This fixes stalls/errors and brings some performance improvements to our NFS implementation.

Game/Retroplayer

• Assorted fixes to the new Savestate Manager to improve usability. Thanks to @KOPRajs for reporting, and also providing the PR to fix the issues found.
• An assortment of OSD improvements by @garbear resolving further issues reported by @KOPRajs.
• A number of performance improvements (memory reads, faster dialogs/savestates).
• Input fixes have been made that allow resetting multitap controller inputs, as well as fixing an issue around "ignored" input buttons not being saved.
• Sync of some of the common controller types has been made
• game.controller.default
• game.controller.keyboard
• game.controller.mouse
• game.controller.snes

General

• Fixes various overflows when using new chrono infrastructure. This fixes "keep audio device alive" when passthrough is used with an AVR.
• A number of fixes by @ksooo that aim to fix regressions regarding context menu items/behaviour.
• A fix for an issue on 32-bit systems that affected the sorting of items. Thanks @vpeter4.
• Fixes regarding the rework of the Favourites window have been addressed. This returns behaviour found in v19 for the following:
• Support actions up/down plus key mapping for u and d keys.
• Support action delete plus key mapping for delete key.
• Change keymaps to open the Favourites Browser window instead of the Favourites dialog as currently.
• A fix by a returning team member (@CrystalP) that resolves crashes due to Unicode characters.

Android

• Fix packaging regression that affected some parts of the Python PyCryptodome module.

Windows

• A fix was made to address an issue where some less-than-usual dimension videos were causing AMD systems to fallback to software decoding instead of using DXVA.
• A packaging issues on Windows platforms meant that Chorus was unable to be used. A fix was found by @CrystalP, so users wanting to access Chorus from a Windows host can now rejoice.

PVR

• A fix to resolve PVR Channel Groups to correctly show channels ordered as provided by a PVR backend.

Python

• A bump of cPython to 3.11.2 was made to fix an upstream issue with the ElementTree binary module. This fixes crashes on Android when an installed addon uses the common ElementTree Python module.

Subtitles

• A regression was fixed regarding Right to Left language subtitles placing punctuation incorrectly. It turns out that @CastagnaIT's implementation was too correct, and an informal standard adopted by subtitle creators to place punctuation in Left to Right positions in Right to Left subtitles was worked around.
• A couple of fixes for WebVTT subtitles were made to resolve overlapping of segments.
• Line spacing has been altered in our use of libass to avoid overlapping of text boxes.

UPnP

• @enen92 has made a number of improvements and fixes when Kodi is being used as a UPnP server. He has fixed a number of regressions around listings and artwork.

Database

• A couple of fixes have gone in to resolve database migration issues from v19.
• The first of these is the EPG database migration. This fixes the problem with the EPG loading and then disappearing. Thanks @ksooo for the prompt fix.
• A second DB migration issue that only occurred on the Microsoft UWP platform (Xbox and UWP desktop) has been fixed by @thexai . This was an odd one, as the code that dealt with the failure was old code (6+ years). It was traced to an odd race condition that only manifested on the UWP platforms, however the root cause potentially could happen on any other platform.

General

• A fix for playlist detection for both Audio and Video was made by @ksooo - https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/22270

Platform Specific

• Linux
• @popcornmix has fixed an issue for DRMPrime on Linux. This allows hardware formats like Broadcom 8-bit (SAND128) and 10-bit (P030) can now be correctly rendered with the latest Mesa.
• macOS
• A fix to allow Kodi to execute on macOS 10.13 has been made. We would still strongly suggest users use a newer version (10.14+), however this allows users still on 10.13 to run Kodi.
• A regression for macOS reading actual disks was resolved by @enen92 . As part of this, the libcdio driver was also fixed to enable disk usage on Apple Silicon native builds.
• Windows
• A fix to a crash that only occurred on Windows Debug builds has been resolved. This didn't affect users of the actual RC1 release, but Windows devs who would attempt to execute Kodi as a Debug build were quickly halted.

PVR

• An issue around multiple resume dialogs has been fixed by @emveepee - https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/22247

Teletext

• Another Teletext issue has been resolved by @repojohnray. @repojohnray has contributed a number of fixes for v20 to help increase the reliability and safety of Kodi.

Addons

• Assorted binary addon fixes/updates - imagedecoder, screensaver, vis. Thanks to @AlwinEsch as always for the huge amount of work supporting Kodi's addon interfaces.
• 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 by @enen92 (link).

Disc

• Update libbluray to 1.3.2 for all platforms (link).
• Fix a "double free" issue when ejecting a disk (link) - Sidenote: thank you @prahal for your first contribution to Kodi core.
• Handle BD_EVENT_DISCONTINUITY (link).

Filesystem

• 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) - Sidenote: @neo1973 is our newest team member, welcome to the team!
• Application refactors. A large effort by @notspiff refactoring some very old code into more manageable chunks.
• Assorted improvements found by static analysis tools. Thanks @Rechi.
• 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. Thanks @notspiff, @ksooo.
• @rubpa has 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).

Platform Specific

• 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. Checkout 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 optimised 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 by @joseluismarti.
• More class parameters have been added to allow more corner cases for starting android apps (link).
• mac
• OSPrevent crash on exit (link).
• TVOS
• Sensitivity on the Remote has been reduced, and the tooltip and setting has been made more intuitive by @sy6sy2.
• 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.

Favourites

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

Skinning

• Added a new infobool 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 correct when frame packed (link).

Video

• Inputstream 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).

Addons

• Some crashes in addon installation and repository checks have been corrected (ksooo, howie-f)
• AlwinEsch has implemented a large feature to allow multiple instances of the same binary addon.

This allows, for example, two instances of a PVR addon (e.g. PVR.HTS) to run using different backend provider instances. The usage of this will require updates from the various binary addons that will start to happen, so if you are interested in helping your favourite PVR addon to implement this, check out the above PVR.HTS PR, as well as the following PVR.Demo PR

Database

• ksooo has been optimising various things in our db wrappers for better performance (link)

DVD

• Fix DVD Menu indicators for DRMPrime (link)

Filesystem

• Fix NFS for Windows platforms after some recent NFS updates
• Several NFS improvements/cleanups
• Initial NFS4 implementation (link)

Font/Glyh

• Several improvements around our Font/Glyph Handling code from several team members (ksooo, thexai, sarbes) - improvements that should help low power machines in particular, but all platforms generally.
• Harbuzz glyph caching improvements (link)
• Fix some inconsistencies with RTL languages and certain skinning components (link)

Games

• Improvements/cleanups regarding controllers (link)
• Fix crash if controller info files don't have correct info (link)

General

• Rechi has done a bunch of leg work implementing improvements from Static analysis tools like CPPCheck (link) and ClangTidy (link)
• Remove obsolete addons from Core Kodi install (link)
• Fix wrong player playlist type for STRM file playback (link)

Input

• Fix using mouse to drag/drop some controls (link)

Platform Specific

• Linux GBM
• Ability to set HDR Output (link)
• MacOS
• Allow the OSX arm64 (Apple Silicon) build to correctly find appropriate binary addons from repositories.
• Windows
• Fix incorrect window positioning when transitioning window to fullscreen and back (link)

PVR

• ksooo continues updating/refining/fixing all things PVR related

Skinning

• Estuary
• Show titles when "Flatten Hierarchy" setting enabled (link)

Subtitles

• Further improvements/refinements to subtitles from CastagnaIT

Video

• Fix for 3D MVC Playback (link)