Although the Kodi Foundation pushed out an emergency update for Kodi 18 ‘Leia’ last week to fix an internet access issue caused by a technical change from Cloudflare, the team’s main focus has been on Kodi 19 ‘Matrix’, the next big release of the hugely popular home theater software.
Today the team rolls out a brand new Kodi 19.x ‘Matrix’ preview build with a large number of improvements.
19.x ‘Matrix’ Alpha 3 is expected to be the final alpha release before we hit the beta stage. It’s obviously still a very early build, so won’t be for everyone, but it comes with a sizeable list of feature changes and improvements, which include:
Music Library
- Small fixes to album duration for music in unusual folder layouts, and triggering rescraping of a single artist or album.
Music Videos
- Fetch related album and artist info (including art, bio, review etc) from the music library where appropriate
- Display all music videos for an artist, not just the ones related to an album when navigating by artist
- Searching from the info dialog for an artist now includes all of related library albums as well as any videos
- Possibility to use .nfo files so that the artist list can now show all performers from music videos, not just the main artist
- Info dialogs will display data from the music library where there’s a corresponding artist and/or album
- Fix the same director search for music videos
Playback
- Correct the color mapping of HLG HDR playback in SDR mode on Windows 10
- Add HLG HDR playback as HDR10 on Windows 10 (as Windows does not support passthrough of HLG)
- Added support for more OpenGL bicubic scalers
Skin/Look-and-Feel
- [Estuary] Add chapter info from music videos to OSD
- [Estuary] Improve the next item in playlist info for music videos by adding artist/album details if available
- [Estuary] Improve the Now Playing info for music videos when not in full-screen video by adding artist/album details if available
- [Estuary] Optional poster for music videos
- Behavior changes to DialogAddonInfo buttons (e.g. contextual focus defaults to install, update, configure, etc.)
- Add PVR.TimeShiftSeekbar infolabel to expose seekbar outside of the SeekBar dialog
Games
- Implement integer scaling support to improve the viewing quality of Pixel Art games
Information Providers/Scrapers
- New default Python metadata scrapers for movies and TV shows (replacing old XML scrapers)
API/JSON-RPC
- Add ability to apply a new subtitle URI to the player, e.g. URL, local file, etc.
- Updates to allow VideoLibrary.Clean by directory
- Improvements and fixes around PVR handling via the API
PVR
- Remember last opened (vs current last played) TV/Radio group across restarts
If you don’t mind taking a risk running alpha software, you can grab Alpha 2 from here.