New Kodi 19 'Matrix' release delivers major feature changes

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.

SEE ALSO: Emergency update for Kodi 18 'Leia' fixes internet access issue and more

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.