by 
The Kodi 20 “Nexus” has been released today as the latest stable update of this free, open-source, and cross-platform home theater software for GNU/Linux, Android, Raspberry Pi, iOS, tvOS, macOS, and Windows platforms.
Kodi 20 “Nexus” is a massive update that comes nearly two years after Kodi 19 “Matrix” to introduce major and exciting new features like support for the PipeWire multimedia server, AV1 hardware decoding on Linux via VA-API (Video Acceleration API), AV1 codec support for InputStream, as well as built-in Steam Deck controller support.
Also new is initial support for the NFS version 4 (NFSv4) network file system protocol, WS-Discovery (SMB discovery) for UNIX platforms (Linux, Android, and Apple), AV1 hardware decoding on Android, independent volume settings for GUI sounds, new Colour Picker window dialog, new media flags for HDR videos, and the ability to add video HDR type information to a video list item.
On top of that, Kodi 20 brings support for mounting optical media by default on Linux, native support for Apple M1 including native windowing and input handling, ACES/Hable tonemapping support and more BiCubic shaders for GLES on Linux, as well as support for read-only recordings.
Also for Linux users, there’s the ability to set HDR output when using the Generic Buffer Management (GBM) API, which provides a mechanism for allocating buffers for graphics rendering tied to the Mesa graphics stack.
Of course, there are also numerous improvements like support for specifying providers for PVR Channels and Recordings, better support for multi PVR Add-on scenarios, better Siri Remote handling on iOS and tvOS, as well as better subtitles support for the ASS/SSA, TX3G, SAMI, and WebVTT formats.
In fact, there are many new subtitle changes, including new font style settings like border size and color, background type, color, and opacity, shadow color and opacity, as well as blur, support for displaying subtitles with dynamic positions, underlined and strikethrough text style support, new wide color palette in color settings, support for changing text alignment for closed caption subtitles, and the ability to override subtitles metadata (e.g. style and position).
The Estuary PVR Home Screen received various enhancements as well, including a new widget for timers, percentage played progress bars for Recent Channels and Recent Recordings widgets, new default click action to open the Guide window, and better displaying of EDL markers on the default skin.
The Estuary default skin also received extend context menu functionality for Music and Video, a new home screen widget for saved searches, revamped home screen widget for timers, as well as various visual changes to the OSD and the home screen widgets for PVR.
The GUI has been enhanced with a new feature to allow you to continue watching media from certain video folders via the context menu of several folder locations like Movie Sets, TV Shows, and others.
Many other changes are included in Kodi 20, such as improved resuming of Blu-Rays and DVD ISOs in file mode, improved playback of some optical discs on Linux, HarfBuzz-based rendering for scripts with Open Type Font shaping features, a new function for recursively removing orphaned dependencies of add-ons, as well as better H.265 and TrueHD support.
In addition, you’ll find a new Favorites window that provides different views and other enhancements, improved 3D MVC playback support, the ability to browse available PVR client add-ons from PVR settings, new ID3 tag metadata stream support for PVR Radio add-ons, persistent EPG search, and better DRMPrime support on Linux.
Kodi 20 “Nexus” has been released as a source tarball for those who want to compile it on their systems and can be downloaded from the project’s GitHub page. Binaries for various supported platforms will be available soon on the official website.
Image credits: The Kodi Foundation
Last updated 1 year ago
