Kodi 18 Leia: New Features, Downloads, and Installation Guides

Kodi 18.9 Leia is now available for download on all supported platforms, including Amazon Fire Stick, Firestick 4K, Fire TV Cube, Windows PC, Mac, Android, iOS, and Linux.

Because the update included enhancements and bug fixes, it is hoped that Kodi 18.9 will provide users with a better experience.

There are many new code additions in Kodi 18; as you can see in the Kodi 18 features list below, these should enable a better streaming experience, but don’t expect any significant changes in the way you use Kodi.

What Features Are New In Kodi 18.9 Leia?

The following are the various areas that have been improved with the release of the 18.9 update.

• Scrapers, streaming addons, and other Kodi internet access were all affected by third-party changes to HTTP2 and SSL/encryption.
• TexturePacker memory leaks have been fixed.
• The update resolved the issue where the event server was unable to send raw key strikes.
• It resolved problems with directory navigation and incorrectly configured start directories.
• MediaCodec OES/EGL rendering has been fixed.

How To Download And Install Kodi 18.9 Leia

As new users of the Amazon FireStick, a streaming media player from Amazon, you’ll be happy to know that downloading and installing Kodi Leia on your FireStick, Fire TV Stick 4K, or any other Fire TV device will only take a few minutes.

New Users Guide: How to Install Kodi on a Fire Stick.

Users Guide: How to Update Kodi on a Fire Stick.

Kodi 18.9 For Windows Download.

You can find Kodi Leia in the official app store now. If you can’t find the latest Kodi 18.9 version in the Store, users of the Firestick and Fire TV will find installation and update guides for their devices at the following links:

64-Bit

32-Bit

Double-click the downloaded file and follow the on-screen instructions to install it.
You can use the Kodi installation guide if you’re not sure what you’re doing or if you get stuck.

Kodi 18.9 For Mac Download.

64-Bit

To install, double-click the downloaded.dmg file and drag the Kodi icon into the Applications folder.   If you need more information, consult the Kodi guide.

Kodi 18.9 Leia For iOs Download.

Additionally, Kodi Leia for iOS must be sideloaded. This requires a jailbroken device.

Arm32

Arm64

Follow this tutorial to learn how to install Kodi Leia on iOS.

Kodi 18.9 APK For Android Download.

In various regions, Kodi 18.9 is now available to download from the Google Play Store. If it is not yet available in your country, you can download the sideload APK file from the following links:

64-Bit

32-Bit

The installation of Kodi APK on Android devices is very simple, but if you need assistance, here is a helpful guide.

Kodi 18.9 Xbox One.

The official Microsoft Store now installs Kodi Leia 18.9 on the Xbox One.

Follow these steps to install Leia 18.9 on Xbox One:

• Switch on your Xbox One.
• On the home screen, select the Search option.
• Type Kodi
• In the search results, select the Kodi icon.
• On the next screen, select Get.

Installing Kodi 18.9 on Linux

To install Kodi Leia on Linux, you’ll need to type the following series of commands into the terminal:

• sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install kodi

To learn more, read this installation guide.

Raspberry Pi with Kodi 18.9

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to set up Kodi on a Raspberry Pi.

Installing Kodi 18.9 on Fire TV, Fire Cube or FireStick

This installation guide will provide you with the steps required to install Kodi 18.9 onto a firestick.

When you add a repository to your firestick, you’ll be able to access a variety of streaming add-ons; here’s a list of the best Kodi add-ons.

Additionally, you’ll find this list of the best Kodi Builds useful because it contains a list of builds that will assist you in simplifying the process of installing the best add-ons and repositories.

Kodi Leia Installation Procedures

Follow these instructions to install Kodi Leia on most platforms:

• Go to https://kodi.tv/download to get Kodi.
• Choose an operating system.
• To download the app file for your operating system, click the appropriate link.

Complete Revision Log for Kodi 18.9

• Workarounds for third-party changes to HTTP2 and SSL/encryption that impacted internet access from Kodi via scrapers, streaming addons, and other applications.
• TexturePacker’s memory leaks have been fixed.
• Resolve the issue where the event server is unable to send raw key strikes
• Resolve directory navigation issues and incorrectly configured start directories
• Resolve MediaCodec OES/EGL rendering issues

Complete Revision Log for Kodi18.8

• Fixes a critical security flaw in gnutls.
• Updates to the library and compatibility
• Gets MariaDB 10.5.4 client/server to work for Android.
• Fixes access to the video database in Ubuntu 20.4 and other distros that use older libfmt versions (search and other filtering failed)
• Fixes the handling of subtitles from archives.
• CDDB access is now fixed.
• Improvements to logging and memory reporting/display are made.
• Fixes EDLs with skip points at the beginning of the file.
• Contains code improvements to address specific events, such as race conditions in the EPG or Android’s “pause” at the end of streams.
• Allows the video player to use alpha blending (Windows)
• Specialized exceptions are better handled (Android, mostly)

Complete Revision Log for Kodi 18.7

Audio

• Fix to prevent volume settings from being reset by the user (Android)
• Support for multi-channel audio tracks has been improved.

Display/Playback

• Language recognition for Bluray subtitles has been improved.
• Fix the playback of bluray discs with bus encryption.
• If the media source is removed, the library handling for plugins is improved.
• For MediaCodec, use JNI instead of NDK (Android)
• Work on the maximum width and height/vertical-shift will continue (Android)
• Fixes for handling TS streams in real time.

Interface/Appearance and Feel

• When the content type isn’t set, the watch icons don’t show up (Estouchy)
• In skinsettings, fix the navigation (Estuary)
• Resolve a crash in the Favorites dialog box.
• Incorporate safe area insets into the Kodi user interface (iOS)
• After a touch action, the focus is fixed around it.
• Improvements to the handling of dialog and toast
• When accessing locked media sources, the behavior has been improved.

Music

• Fixes for the “isalbumartist” field in the library.
• To avoid GUI freezes, fixes have been made around the expansion of.ISO images.
• When scraping, make sure the album artist isn’t blanked out.

Build System

• Resolve mirror download dependencies (Windows)
• Gnutls (3.6.11.1) and nettle have been bumped in the library (3.5.1)

 Personal Video Recorder.

• When new channels are added during startup, the EPG becomes corrupted.

Network

• Handling of proxy credentials has been improved.
• Empty proxy fields have been fixed (proxy, username, password)

Addons

• If an incompatible VFS addon is present, the crash will be fixed.
• Fix title display in compressed package directories.
• Fixes for the naming of the addon settings folder.

Subtitles

• Decoding of HTML escape characters has been improved.
• Fix the quoted start tag and SMI (SAMI) subtitles.

Profiles

• Issues with switching profiles have been resolved.
• Fixes for locking preferences saving (master lock, lock video windows, etc.)

General/Other

• To language codes, add “Swiss German” and “Portuguese (Brazil)”.
• In tinyxml, make a fix to protect against assert.
• Fix the stack overflow when trying to find NFO files in a RAR file.
• In URIUtils::resolvePath, implement range checking.
• Support extended local headers in ZIP files, which are used by some scrapers.

Complete Revision log for Kodi 18.6

Audio

• Fixes centered on visualizations
• Fixes for the pause/resume feature
• TrueHD crashes have been fixed.
• Workaround for a firmware flaw (AMLogic v23) (As a side note, due to old AMLogic workarounds, there are a lot more Android audio fixes that can’t be merged into 18.x “Leia”).
• Restarting audio-only MPEG-TS streams correctly has been fixed.
• Enumeration of headphones correctly (Android)

Build System

• Missing information has been updated.
• Cmake has been updated (Windows)
• Handling and packaging of devices have been updated (macOS)

Games

• Launching disc images and.zip files has been improved.
• Fixes for RGB emulators’ black screens (Rpi)

Interface/Appearance and Feel

• TextureCache has been fixed.
• Windowing, refresh rate, mode change, and other issues have been addressed (Android)
• Fixes for split/floating keyboards (iOS)
• The artist slideshow has been fixed (Estuary)
• Fix the media view from the addon’s content

Display/Playback

• OnPlaybackStarted had a race condition that was fixed.
• Corrections for the MIME type (Android)
• Addons that support DolbyVision streams
• Maximum width and height/vertical-shift fixes (Android)
• Scanning in subdirectories has been fixed.
• On the external screen, adjust the size of the EAGL layer (iOS)
• glTexImage3D has been fixed (Linux)
• Fixes for issues with searching
• When playing a new file, reset the playlist.

 Personal Video Recorder

• Multiline episode names have been fixed.

General/Other

• Corrected a time zone that was incorrectly formatted.
• Python scrapers receive JSON serialized path settings.
• File access on auto-mounted sources has been fixed.
• Fixing the FileCache lockup will help you find what you’re looking for.
• Passthrough on USB devices has been fixed (Android)
• If profile.xml becomes corrupted, fix the crash.
• On EOF, increase the cache forward size.

Complete Revision Log for Kodi 18.5

Interface/Look-and-Feel 

• Fixes to the estuary and GUI, including scrollbar behavior, icon names, and label changes
• Artist Slideshow 2.x and 3.x now have dual support.
• Allowing the ‘Black’ screen saver to be used at all times is now possible.
• Fix the music playlists node’s sort order list.

Display/Playback

• External subtitle playback has been fixed.
• Support for archives over UPnP has been improved.
• Fixes for STRM files with Plugin URL in “queue item” and “play next”
• Fixes for videos’ “watched” status.
• When a file is marked as unwatched, it is fixed so that it can be handled again.

 Personal Video Recorder

• Fixes for the EPG database storage, as well as the start/stop of the PVR service.
• Resolve the issue with open modal dialogs.
• Commercial skip (EDL) processing has been improved.

Fixes for Other/General Issues

• There have been a number of changes to Android, including windowing, secure decoding, and SDK versions.
• Support for the iPhone 11 and iPad 7th generation has been added, Touch input, overlapping drawing surfaces, sandbox checks, and notch support have all been fixed.
• Fixes for MacOS windowing, where only a portion of the screen was rendered correctly.
• Improvements to log files in terms of verbosity and security
• Improvements to the shoutcast
• Fixes and improvements have been made to add-on settings, package build documentation, the build system, advancedsettings.xml, skin/profile changes, and many other subsystems.

Complete Revision Log For Kodi 18.4

Interface

• While sorting from within the addon, missing text was fixed.
• While closing the window, you can now clear or save the focus history. The item in the parent folder will be the focus.
• The slideshow of skin from the estuary has been fixed.
• For games, you can now subscribe to controller install events.
• The radio button’s text length has been fixed in the Estuary skin.
• Seasons and episodes have been formatted correctly for video addons.
• The ids of the display modes are no longer considered constant.

Display/Playback

• PlayMedia for artists in smart playlists in Music and builtin for playlists in.strm have been fixed.
• PlayMedia’s built-in support for music and smart playlists has also been improved.
• FFmpeg has been upgraded to version 4.0.4.
• Without having to use streaminfo in video, Stream properly can now be used to load programs.
• Initialization of the AVD3D11VAContext structure was also fixed (video, Windows)
• The TS Resume point for PR16314 (video) has been fixed.
• In Linux, memory leaks and seagulls have been fixed, as well as video.
• Also fixed is the PA Player’s ability to handle TrueHD audio passthrough.

Personal Video Recorder

• Dependencies between components have been fixed.
• PVR Recordings has a feature that prevents concurrent calls to the video database.

Other Modifications

• +sign has been added to the HTTP folder.
• The controller has been fixed in a number of ways.
• When you refresh the video information, the stream details are now removed.
• For failed entries, Kodi no longer tries to resolve the plugin paths.

Complete Revision Log For Kodi 18.1

• JSON-RPC speeds up player and playlist operations.
• For advanced settings “updateemptytagsinterval,” define a sensible default value.
• Revert the edge case crash fix that prevented DVDs from being recognized on Mac OS X.
• Remove the advanced setting “dxvaallowhqscaling” to prepare for DXVA improvements in v18.2 for Windows.
• Fix the use of required configuration values in Linux X11.
• To the log records, add a date.
• On Win10 >= FCU, don’t react to DPI change events.
• Fix an Android MediaCodec freeze when a stream is discarded too soon.
• If abort is requested, flush streamplayers, which solves the problem of waiting too long (on skipping DVD intros, for example)
• In the GUI engine, fix ListitemAbsolute and ListItemPosition.
• For PVR servers, ignore the first “server not reachable” notification.
• For SQLite, use extended result codes.
• Improve MPEG2 playback on Android devices by fixing an invalid PTS decoder value.
• SSL CA trust store needs to be updated
• In GUIFontTTFGL, handle empty vertex buffers, which caused a hard crash.
• PVR setting “Close channel OSD after switching channels” should be reintroduced.
• Fix Android thread logging, which can result in frozen DVD/Bluray playback.
• Smartplaylists should not attempt to load music information.
• Reverse the trend of the Top 100 Albums
• RenderCapture: Only check for occlusion if the GL is less than 1.5.
• If the whitelist doesn’t match, check the current mode and take the appropriate action.
• On Android, see if the app intent is correct. This resolves a hard crash when attempting to relaunch Kodi.
• Fix the creation of PVR input streams for PVR file items that only have a path and no recording/channel tag.
• Using the inputstream addon, you can now play VP9 streams. It failed because there is no codec extradata for this stream codec.
• While reading or writing a file, you may encounter an exception.
• Fix the GUI engine’s logical “or” operation.
• Before reporting sleep states S1/S2/S3/S4 as available, make sure the system can support them.
• PCSX ReARMed with BIOS fixes a crash.
• Several cosmetic fixes for the Estuary

Complete Revision Log For Kodi 18.0 Leia

1.1 Gaming (Games interface and Game Clients)

• The GUI now includes a “Games” window (games are managed using a basic file browser as a game library does not exist yet)
• A RetroPlayer player core has been added, which supports game client addons as well as emulator cores via the libretro API.
• Extensions to Kodi’s Addons have been added. Game Client Addons will be supported, as well as Kodi’s VFS (Virtual File System).
• Game Client Addons are now supported as a new type of addon with just-in-time emulator installation.
• The GUI now includes a Games window and Game OSD (On-Screen-Display) entries.
• The GUI now includes a gaming and game configuration interface for Game settings.
• The ability to expose properties to Python list items has been added, as well as support for Game Info Tags (game info tag).
• Kodi now has a savestate (savestate) manager for games.
• Initial support for basic gameplay persistence has been added (auto-save & auto-load)
• Support for in-game (RAM save) saves has been added.
• Joystick Emulation has been added to support keyboard players.
• Game API abstraction for game controller multitaps (also known as hubs) has been added, as well as a topology GUI display.
• Gamepad/joystick remapping for games is now possible thanks to the addition of the Game API acbstraction (per game-addon)
• Game API acbstraction has been added to support keyboard remapping in games (per game-addon)
• Game API acbstraction has been added to support mouse remapping in games (per game-addon)
• Support for the libretro API, as well as game cores (emulators and games) that support it as binary addons, has been added.
• There are now addons for a variety of popular third-party game console emulators as well as native open source games.
• * Game client addons for Kodi are constantly changing, so check out the game client addons article for the most up-to-date list.

1.2 PVR and live TV (Personal Video Recorder)

• RDS (Radio Data System) support for radio channels has been added if the PVR backend client supports RDS.
• New options for ‘Startup action’ and ‘Play TV/Radio’ have been added.
• Support for global direct channel number input as well as global unique channel numbers has been added.
• When using direct channel number input, no delay on switching to previous channel with key 0 has been added.
• Estuary (skin) PVR home screen widgets now have context menu support.
• In Estuary, a percent played progress bar has been added to the PVR info panel (for recordings) (skin)
• Estuary (skin) home screen now has Info support for the recently played channel widget.
• In Estuary, the episode name has been added to Live TV, the recordings OSD sub label has been added, and the seekbar has been cleaned up (skin)
• Season/Episode information has been added to the Guide window and the Estuary dialog (skin)
• In the OSD Timeshift window, next and previous buttons are now supported.
• In the timer settings dialog, a new option to pre-fill the recordings folder with the timer title has been added.
• The channelgroup manager now supports radio channel groups.
• The guide window now supports a feature called “Smart selection” of EPG events.
• The guide window now has a ‘Go to date’ context menu item.
• The guide window now includes a channel groups selector.
• The guide window now has the option to switch between horizontal and vertical epg grid views.
• Support for sorting content by channel number/channel name/last played has been added to the Guide window, as well as support for sort order.
• Support for next/previous chapter in PVR recordings has been added.
• Estuary’s PVR seekbar and info dialog have been improved (skin)
• In Estuary, the PVR info panel, info dialog, and recordings window have all been improved (skin)
• Support for multiple PVR client addons has been improved.
• Support for subchannel numbers has been improved (ATSC)
• OSD Timeshift GUI has been improved.
• Improved the readability and consistency of the guide window.
• Changed UI actions to remove redundant and dead code (major GUI refactoring for PVR and LiveTV)
• EPG search filter implementation has been tweaked (EPG search dialog) absolutely
• Removed obsolete views from the Guide Window. “channel,” “now,” and “next” are all terms that can be used interchangeably.
• Handling of “play minimized” settings has been changed.
• Removed the respective advanced setting and changed ‘epg.lingertime’ to an official setting.
• Shared channel selection has been made an optional setting.
• ‘pvrplayback.scantime’ was deprecated and removed.
• The EPG event info dialog’s channel guide button has been removed, and a new context menu item called “channel guide” has been added.
• ‘Hide connection lost warning’ was removed as a setting.
• Default recording settings that were not working were removed.
• Content view filter in the Recordings window
• Changes to the PVR-Addon API
• Addons for popular third-party external PVR backend platforms for PVR backend clients have been added, updated, and improved.
• Zattoo PVR Client is a backend client for the Zattoo PVR Addon that is maintained and available from the Kodi community.
• Teleboy PVR Client is now available. Kodi’s community maintains and makes the PVR Addon backend client available.
• Sledovanitv.cz PVR Client is a backend client for the PVR Addon that is maintained and available from the Kodi community.
• PVR Demo Client dummy addon with fictitious content (method stub) PVR skinning and regression testing using the PVR backend
• Kodi’s community maintains and makes available the IPTV Simple Client PVR Addon backend client.
• Kodi’s community maintains and makes the FilmOn PVR Addon backend client available.
• Kodi’s community maintains and makes available the Stalker Middleware PVR Addon backend client.
• The backend client for HDHomeRun PVR Addon is maintained and available through Kodi’s community.
• Digital Devices maintains and makes available the Octopus NET Client PVR Addon backend client.
• Kodi’s community maintains and makes available the Enigma2 (Dreambox / Vu+ / DBox2) PVR Addon backend client.
• The backend client for VBox TV Gateway PVR Addon is maintained and available through Kodi’s community.
• Backend client for Njoy Digital (N7) PVR Addon is maintained and available from Kodi’s community.
• The backend client for the PCTV Systems (Broadway) PVR Addon is maintained and available from Kodi’s community.
• Tvheadend HTSP Client PVR Addon is a Kodi community-maintained and available backend client.
• Backend client for VDR VNSI Client PVR Addon is maintained and available from Kodi’s community.
• The Kodi community maintains and makes available the MythTV PVR Client Addon backend client.
• PVR Addon backend client NextPVR (formerly GB-PVR) is maintained and available from Kodi’s community.
• The backend client for Argus TV (formerly ForTheRecord) PVR Addon is maintained and available from Kodi’s community.
• Kodi’s community maintains and makes the DVBLink PVR Client Addon backend client available.
• DVBViewer Client PVR Addon is a Kodi community-maintained and available backend client.
• Kodi’s community maintains and makes available the MediaPortal PVR Client Addon backend client.
• Kodi’s community maintains and makes available the WMC (Windows Media Center) PVR Addon backend client.

1.3 Framework, API, and Manager for Add-ons

• Inside Kodi, a Python 3 interpreter was added (plus enforcing Python 2 & 3 compatibility in Leia addon repository)
• Kodi now automatically installs and updates binary addons from an online binary addon repository.
• The core handling and GUI management of binary addons in Kodi has been significantly refactored.
• Support for VFS (Virtual File System) as binary addons has been added to the framework.
• The Framework has been supported with binary add-ons for video decoder codecs.
• The framework has been added to support binary additionals for picture decoder codecs.
• Kodi’s Addons API has been extended to support binary addons for video decoder codecs.
• Kodi’s Addons API has been extended to support binary addons for image decoder codecs.
• Python addons can now use the PyCryptoDome crypto module for decryption.
• AVOption has been added to Kodi’s Video Player to allow HTTP cookies to be passed.
• Addons now have the ability to edit all of the controls on their processed window.
• Python addons now have the ability to set the videoinfotag path.
• Python addons now have the ability to get and set the dbid of a (music) listitem.
• Support for mediatype has been added to the Python API for retrieving musicinfotag tags.
• The Python API of Kodi now supports “int/float sliders.”
• Kodi’s Python API now supports “setContent for mediawindows.”
• Help for loading shared libraries has been added, as well as the ability to use their own addon temp folder.
• Support for inspecting add-on dependencies prior to installation has been added.
• When you uninstall an add-on, you now have the option to remove its settings.
• To use on the addon window, I switched to a new addon gui interface for list items.
• Instead of synchronous addon hooks, service addons now use event handlers.

1.4 System of Input (Input Manager and Input APIs)

•  
• For keyboards, mice, and game controllers, the input manager and input API system have been improved.
• Updated “Peripheral Addons” (in Kodi-game repo) for game controllers, gamepads, joysticks, and input peripherals profiles:
• Add-on for Joystick Controller
• Support for X-Arcade (XGaming Tankstick) on Kodi Addon
• Addon for Steam Controller (Gamepad)
• Addon for the default game controller (reference game controller addon based on Xbox 360 gamepad)
• Add-On for PlayStation Game Controller
• Add-On for the Nintendo NES Game Controller
• Add-On for the Nintendo SNES Game Controller
• Add-On for the Nintendo N64 Game Controller
• Add-on for the Nintendo GBA Game Controller
• Add-On for the Sega Genesis Game Controller
• Add-on for the Sega Dreamcast game controller

1.5 graphical user interface engine (Skinning Engine)

• In the new default skins, windows to support Games and Game OSD have been added (Estuary and Estouchy)
• Kodi’s default skin now includes a player process info dialog (Estuary)
• Addons now have the ability to use banner and ClearLogo.
• Skins/gui now have support for implicit container referencing for non-media windows.
• Addons can now add “Enable/Disable” to the context menu.
• In the GUI, support for remembering the last used keyboard layout has been added.
• Retrieval of ISO 639-2/T language codes has been added (required by libbluray)
• In the GUI settings, under system info, a window displaying Kodi’s privacy policy has been added.
• Support for mapping a key to search for subtitles in a video fullscreen window has been added.
• Message handling and SmartRedraw optimizations have been added to Kodi’s GUI engine.
• Support for scaling container layouts in Kodi’s GUI engine has been improved.
• Allowing percent -values for origin, camera, and animation attribs improved Kodi’s GUI engine.
• To avoid GUI lockup while waiting, context menu reloading is now done async.
• Guili has been updated.
• Some languages’ keyboard layouts have been updated, and support has been added. Croatian, Slovenian, and Thai cuisines are all popular in Thailand (Kedmanee)
• Image resource addons have been updated (as example weather icons, weather fanart, studio logos, and genre icons)

1.6 Playback that is platform agnostic

• Support for passing CryptoSession flags field to “InputStream” (input stream) addons has been added.
• Support for BD-J / Blu-ray Disc has been added. Support for Java menus (requires system Java runtime enviroment)
• The ability to detect and use Blu-ray Discs was added, as well as meta data for Blu-ray Disc names.
• Video buffers are now supported by decoders and renderers.
• Support for platforms that register custom buffers, such as dma, has been added.
• For improved VC-1 playback, a VC1-Packet bitstream parser implementation was added.
• Many (binary) addons have been added and updated to the audio and encoder of Kodi.
• There were also some (binary) addons to the video decoder for Kodi.
• Kodi now has a “RAW” (libraw-based) image decoder addon.
• On the Raspberry Pi, improved MMAL playback of H.264 MVC (Blu-ray 3D) stereoscopic video with framepacking decoding.
• 3D video playback in stereoscopic 3D has been improved (as well as better 2D playback of 3D videos)
• Blu-ray support has been improved and enhanced (including updated libbluray dependencies from the VideoLAN project).
• Support for “InputStream” addons has improved as system addons.
• Updated client addons for common network streaming protocols and popular services called “InputStream” (input stream):
• Addon for InputStream (default reference) Team Kodi’s InputStream Addon
• InputStream Test Addon for Kodi’s new interface inputstream (Test InputStream Addon for Kodi’s new inputstream interface)
• Addon for Adaptive InputStream (InputStream Client addon for several manifest types)
• Addon for RTMP InputStream (InputStream Client for RTMP streams using librtmp)
• InputStream Addon for MPD (MPEG-DASH)
• MS-SSTR (SmoothStreamingMedia) Smooth Streaming Protocol SmoothStream InputStream Addon
• Netflix style manifests with the NXMSL InputStream Addon for MSL.
• FFmpeg multimedia codec and demux libraries have been updated to FFmpeg 4.0 stable branch release (4.0.2)
• Certain audio codecs were removed from the core and turned into binary add-ons for audio decoders and encoders.
• Certain video codecs were removed from the core and replaced with video decoder binary add-ons.
• Certain image codecs were removed from the core and replaced with image decoder binary add-ons.

1.7 Library in General

•  
• Support for using the Favorites function in context menus has been added.
• Context menu support has been added to the favorites home screen widget.
• In the Music Video title node, support for “Sort By Date Added” has been added.

1.8 Library of Music

• Rescaning the music file tags for existing items in the library has been added as an option.
• WRITER tag processing for ID3 v2, Vorbis, and APE formats has been added.
• To provide a sort name for artists, processing of the ARTISTSORT (TSOP), ALBUMARTISTSORT (TS02), and COMPOSERSORT (TSOC) tags has been added.
• A new dialog for selecting artist and album scraper addons, as well as their settings, has been added.
• Additional artist data from Musicbrainz has been added, including type (individual, group, orchestra, choir, etc. ), gender, and disambiguation comments to help distinguish artists with the same name.
• An Artist Information Folder has been added as a central location for artist artwork and nfo. This resolves a slew of issues with artwork, artist data import, and folder and file structure in general.
• Support for Extended Artwork has been added, allowing you to customize the local art that is automatically picked up during a scan.
• A preference for scraped album covers over embedded images has been added.
• A media source filter has been added to sort the music items.
• BAND and ENSEMBLE (Vorbis and APE) tags have been improved.
• Duplicate MusicBrainzTrackIDs within the same album are now handled more efficiently.
• Cue Sheet handling has been improved.
• Improved on-line scraping of additional information on artists and albums by better use of Musicbrainz IDs.
• On fresh installs, the default song sort order has been changed to Track Number.
• To prevent false matches, FileItem::IsSamePath has been improved for albums and artists.
• Inconsistencies in album genre have been improved.
• When the app processes GUI MSG UPDATE ITEM messages, performance is improved by avoiding unnecessary db access by the GUI.
• Support has been increased for collecting local art for multifolder albums (disc sets)
• Artist/Album Information Dialog has been updated.
• Dialog for Song Information has been updated.

Web Scrapers (1.9)

• Support for Python (script) based web scrapers has been added to Kodi.
• Many XML-based scrapers in Kodi for music, movies, TV shows, and music videos have been refactored and updated.
• Scrapers for music, movies, TV shows, and music videos that have been updated for Kodi.

AudioEngine 1.10

• ActiveAE for BSD, other BSD Unix-based systems, and Linux now has a new Sndio sink.
• ActiveAE (Kodi’s AudioEngine), the default cross-platform event-driven active state machine pattern, has been improved.
• ActiveAE has a better ALSA sink for Linux desktop and Linux-based generic Embedded Systems.
• PulseAudio sink for ActiveAE for Linux Desktop has been improved.
• Open Sound (OSS) sink on BSD systems such as FreeBSD and other BSD Unix-based systems for ActiveAE.
• Amlogic’s AUDIOTRACK sink for ActiveAE has been improved.
• Audio Pi Sink has been enhanced for ActiveAE for Raspberry Pi.
• ActiveAE for Windows now has a better DirectSound sink.
• WASAPI sink for ActiveAE for Windows has been improved.
• ActiveAE for (Mac) OS X and iOS now has a better CoreAudio sink.
• ActiveAE’s Darwin sink has been improved for (Mac) OS X and iOS.
• AE SINK has been renamed to KODI AE SINK.

1.11 Additional

• “Startup action” now has a new unified setting, as well as “Play TV/Radio.”
• Added the ability to build Kodi with Bluetooth support.
• The CMake build system now has the ability to install additional libraries.
• Many addons for Kodi’s audio visualization and screensaver were added and updated.
• The JSON-RPC API in Kodi has been improved.
• Code stability, performance, and security have all been improved, as well as general code cleanup in a number of key areas.
• Compiling/building has been improved, as well as code documentation (following doxygen coding guidelines)
• Kodi logging has been switched to spdlog, and the logging has been improved and further optimized (including debug logs)
• Kodi’s settings configuration now uses an XML format for setting values.
• Mappings for new and existing remote controls have been updated and improved.
• The default web interface has been updated (it is now called “Chorus2” and is at version 2.4.4).
• Updated libraries of critical addictions, like openssl, gnutls & CMake; (used to compile Kodi and its binary addons)
• Last SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) dependencies were removed, which was a hardware abstraction for input devices.
• In Kodi’s code, all glew (libglew library) dependencies were removed.

1.12 Specific to Android

• Moving at a minimum to Android API 26 and SDK 26, and requiring NDK 18 (meaning at least Android 5.0 is still required)
• Speech-to-text support has been added to the Kodi OSD keyboard on Android TV (triggered by voice button on remote)
• Support for moving the Kodi app to the SD card has been added for Android.
• Support for Android TV has been added. Kodi’s meta data on leanback search and recommendations
• The default setting for Android TV is Leanback to random unwatched films and music albums.
• For Android MediaCodecSurface, the rendertype was changed from GUILayer to VideoLayer.
• For Android MediaCodec, the NDK native C interface has been replaced (for performance gains)
• Changed to use the native Android API to support ZeroConf (and deprecates mDNSresponder)
• Added native Android API support for network information (and deprecates POSIX)
• For better consistency, Kodi’s Java interfaces are now handled via JNI.

BSD Specification 1.13

• In Kodi, BSD (Business System) support has been enhanced on FreeBSD, PC-BSD and other similar BSD Platforms.
• Support for the VAAPI (Video Acceleration API) has been improved (requires VAAPI compatible hardware and drivers)
• VDPAU (NVIDIA) Hardware Video Acceleration has been improved (requires VDPAU compatible hardware and drivers)

Linux-specific 1.14

• Support for a generic DRM/KMS implementation that uses GBM for surface creation and V4L2 for video acceleration has been added.
• Support has been added for Kodi’s Mir Windowing System (Mir 1.0), as well as VAAPI support with Mir’s DRM.
• On embedded platforms, support for the middle mouse button has been added.
• More yuv420p bitwidths are now supported for direct rendering on Linux.
• Support for VAAPI hardware video decoding with OpenGL ES has been added.
• CMake support for building Kodi with imx support has been added.
• The CMake build system has been moved to the top of the code tree (moved to root)
• When hardware allows it, improved support for UltraHD decoding and 4K resolution output.
• ARM processor architecture has been improved (using Raspberry Pi as reference device)
• Support for OpenGL ES and EGL has been improved (using Raspberry Pi as reference device)
• Support for the VAAPI (Video Acceleration API) has been improved (requires VAAPI compatible hardware and drivers)
• VDPAU (NVIDIA) Hardware Video Acceleration has been improved (requires VDPAU compatible hardware and drivers)
• XvBA (AMD/ATI) Hardware Video Acceleration has been improved (requires XvBA compatible hardware and drivers)
• Support for dedicated AMLCodec hardware accelerated video decoding for Linux on Amlogic devices has been improved.
• From Kodi’s VideoPlayer, the unused and unmaintained OpenMAX video decoder was removed.
• Support for autotools-based build systems for Kodi and binary addons has been removed (in favour of CMake)

1.15 Specific to iOS

• Support for iOS 10.0 was added by allowing Kodi to be compiled using the Xcode 8 IDE and the iOS SDK 10.0.
• Support for Apple VDADecoder Video Acceleration on iOS has been improved (on iPad, iPhone, and iPod iDevices)
• In Kodi mainline support has been improved for TVOS (Apple iOS fork for Apple TV 4).
• Support for iOS on ARM64 has been improved (64-bit iOS)

1.16 Macintosh Specific

• Compiling Kodi with the Xcode 8 IDE for OSX 10.11 (El Capitan) and macOS 10.12 has been added (Sierra)
• Support for Apple VDADecoder Video Acceleration for (Mac) OS X has been improved.

1.17 Specific to Windows

• Support for building Kodi for Windows 64 / Windows for Intel 64-bit has been added (x86-64)
• Dithering and 3D LUT (3D Lookup Table) support have been added to the Windows video renderer.
• Kodi has been improved to compile Microsoft UWP (Universal Windows Platform) APIs.
• Ren’s inner workings were altered.
• Unicode Win32 API methods have been replaced.
• On Windows OS platforms, windowing systems for screen saver handling have been changed.
  A change was made in order to make Kodi for Windows independent of posix/main.cpp.
•  Microsoft no longer supports Windows Vista, so it has been removed from the list of supported operating systems.Tip: If you’re new to Kodi, use this resource to learn about the best Addons, Builds, and other popular guides.

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