Kodi 20 'Nexus' hits a major release milestone and comes with some important fixes

A week ago, The Kodi Foundation announced that Kodi 20 'Nexus’, the next version of the hugely popular home theater software, had exited the beta testing stage.

The arrival of the first release candidate meant the software was much closer to achieving general availability and a new update adds some major fixes.

SEE ALSO: Kodi 21 gets an official name

Release Candidate 2 comes with a "small number of fixes", but the team says "they are fairly major". Here’s what’s changed in this build:

Database

• A couple of fixes have gone in to resolve database migration issues from v19.
• The first of these is the EPG database migration. This fixes the problem with the EPG loading and then disappearing. Thanks @ksooo for the prompt fix.
• A second DB migration issue that only occurred on the Microsoft UWP platform (Xbox and UWP desktop) has been fixed by @thexai . This was an odd one, as the code that dealt with the failure was old code (6+ years). It was traced to an odd race condition that only manifested on the UWP platforms, however the root cause potentially could happen on any other platform.

General

• A fix for playlist detection for both Audio and Video was made by @ksooo - https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/22270

Platform Specific

• Linux
  • @popcornmix has fixed an issue for DRMPrime on Linux. This allows hardware formats like Broadcom 8-bit (SAND128) and 10-bit (P030) can now be correctly rendered with the latest Mesa.
• macOS
  • A fix to allow Kodi to execute on macOS 10.13 has been made. We would still strongly suggest users use a newer version (10.14+), however this allows users still on 10.13 to run Kodi.
  • A regression for macOS reading actual disks was resolved by @enen92 . As part of this, the libcdio driver was also fixed to enable disk usage on Apple Silicon native builds.
• Windows
  • A fix to a crash that only occurred on Windows Debug builds has been resolved. This didn't affect users of the actual RC1 release, but Windows devs who would attempt to execute Kodi as a Debug build were quickly halted.

PVR

• An issue around multiple resume dialogs has been fixed by @emveepee - https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/22247

Teletext

• Another Teletext issue has been resolved by @repojohnray. @repojohnray has contributed a number of fixes for v20 to help increase the reliability and safety of Kodi.

Should you wish to try out the new Release Candidate 2 build, go to the download page here and select your preferred platform (Windows, Linux, Android or Raspberry Pi). Click the 'Prerelease' tab at the top to download the new candidate.

Photo credit: Andrey_Popov / Shutterstock