Article by Team Kodi

 

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!

 

You can read the full article from Team Kodi here.

 

You can download the latest release of Kodi for the Operating System of your choice here.

Thanks for posting. I did see the message come up the other day after launching Kodi. Unfortunately however I ended up going back from 20 to 19.5 a while ago due to issues with the add-ons I had so I think it will be a while before I try 21.

 

Saying that I am mainly using it as a viewer these days as said add-ons seem to offer less and less.........

1 minute ago, topt said:

Unfortunately however I ended up going back from 20 to 19.5 a while ago due to issues with the add-ons

 

This is the number one issue for me and what stops me updating

as I have my few addons TVheadend,backend and IPTV simple setup just right and working nicely for a couple of years..only problems being with sdcard corruption on the Raspberry Pi  that runs Kodi

( I still prefer calling it XBMC)