ChangeLog :
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.
kodi.tv
