Here's what's new in Kodi 18.1 'Leia' RC

Yesterday, the Kodi Foundation rolled out a release candidate for Kodi 18.1, the first update for the newest version of its popular home theater software.

If you’ve been having problems with Kodi 18, then you’ll want to grab this as it comes with a long list of fixes and improvements.

SEE ALSO: Kodi 18.1 'Leia' RC now available to download

Kodi 18.1 'Leia' RC promises the following changes:

• Speed up Player and Playlists operations with JSON-RPC
• Define a senseful default value for advanced settings 'updateemptytagsinterval'
• Revert edge case crash fix that caused DVDs to be not recognized on macOS
• Remove "dxvaallowhqscaling" advanced setting to prepare for DXVA improvements in v18.2 for Windows
• Linux X11: fix usage of required configuration values
• Add date to the log records
• Don't react on DPI change event on Win10 >= FCU
• Fix Android MediaCodec freeze when early disposing stream
• Flush streamplayers if abort is requested which solves waiting too long. Skippingskip DVD screens for example
• Fix ListitemAbsolute and ListItemPosition in GUI engine
• Ignore very first "server not reachable" notification for PVR servers
• Use extended result codes for SQLite
• Fix invalid PTS decoder value which should improve MPEG2 playback on Android devices
• update SSL CA trust store
• Handle empty vertex buffers in GUIFontTTFGL which caused a hard crash
• Reintroduce setting "Close channel OSD after switching channels" for PVR
• Fix thread logging on Android which causes issues like freezing on DVD/Bluray playback
• Avoid attempt to load music info for smartplaylists
• Fix Top 100 Albums regression
• RenderCapture: Only query Occlusion if GL lower 1.5
• Check current mode if whitelist doesn't match and take correct action
• Check if app intent is valid on Android. This fixes a hard crash when trying to open Kodi again
• Fix PVR input stream creation for PVR file items only containing a path and no recording/channel tag.
• Fix playing VP9 streams using inputstream addon. It failed because codec extradata is not existent for this stream codec.
• Catch an exception while reading or writing a file
• Fix logical "or" operation in GUI engine
• Check the system capabilities to support sleep states S1/S2/S3/S4 before reporting them as available
• Fix crash in PCSX ReARMed with BIOS
• Several Estuary cosmetic fixes

The full changelog can be found in the GitHub milestone.

To download Kodi 18.1 'Leia' RC, go to the official download page, select your platform of choice and you'll find it under the pre-release tab. For Android and Windows there's an easy-to-use download add-on available in Kodi’s repository.