Nexus I arrive in early 2023 with a lot of cool news, but none as important to many users as addon developers who obfuscate their code updating their plugins to work with the latest versions of Python. Since there is no perfect software and everything can be improved, a few moments ago they have made official the launch of Kodi 20.1. It has come with many new features, and among them one that has nothing to do with the software, but with recognition: for some of the patches they mention the developer who created them.
Kodi 20.1 introduces improvements in a bit of everything, such as file systems, games, although I have doubts that there are many who use it for that, and audio. Personally, reading that they have improved the audio is something that interests me, since I have experienced strange micro-cutting in Linux for a long time, and in LibreELEC it does not work well for me if I watch 1.10x-1.50x videos. I hope some of that has improved with this release, although in the News list Android is specifically mentioned.
What's New in Kodi 20.1
- Improvements in issues related to audio in Android.
- Fixed playback of DVD folder structures via network sources (eg SMB/NFS/HTTP etc.).
- Made a fix in Samba that "corrected" a longstanding assumption - it turns out that the documentation doesn't always match the code implementation. Both the old Samba implementation and the new "correct" implementation are now handled.
- Other improvements to the new NFS4 implementation. This fixes crashes/bugs and brings some performance improvements to the NFS implementation.
- Several improvements in its support for video games.
- Fixes various overflows when using the new chrono infrastructure. Fix “keep audio device alive” when using passthrough with an AVR.
- A number of fixes that are intended to fix regressions concerning context menu items/behavior.
- Fixed an issue on 32-bit systems that affected the ordering of items.
- Fixed issues related to the reshaping of the favorites window. This returns the behavior found in v19 for the following:
- Supports up/down actions plus “u” and “d” key mapping.
- Supports the delete action plus the key binding for the delete key.
- Changes keymaps to open the favorites browser window instead of the current favorites dialog.
- A fix that resolves crashes due to Unicode characters.
- Fixed a packaging regression affecting some of the Python PyCryptomode module on Android.
- Fixed an issue where smaller-than-usual video dimensions caused AMD systems to crash playing in software instead of using DXVA.
- Also on Windows, fixed some issues that made choruses unusable.
- Fixed PVR channel groups resolution to correctly display channels sorted by PVR backend.
- Updated cPython to version 3.11.2 to fix an issue with the ElementTree binary module. This fixes crashes on Android when an installed plugin uses the common ElementTree Python module.
- In the subtitles:
- Fixed a regression regarding incorrect placement of punctuation in right-to-left language subtitles.
- Made a couple of fixes to WebVTT subtitles to resolve segment overlap.
- Changed line spacing in our libass usage to avoid overlapping text boxes.
- A number of improvements and fixes when Kodi is being used as a UPnP server. Fixed a number of regressions around listings and illustrations.
Kodi 20.1 has been announced this afternoon, and is now available for download from its official website for Windows, macOS and Android, and also for tvOS and iOS, but to install it on these devices you need to be a developer and install it by means that have nothing to do with the topic of this blog. Linux users will have to wait a little longer to install Kodi 20.1, unless the special repository for Ubuntu is used (sudo add-apt-repository ppa: team-xbmc / ppa). In the next few days the update will appear on Flatub, and should also be updated in the official repositories of some Linux distributions.