Kodi 20.0 'Nexus' is available to download now -- here's what's new and improved

The second and final Release Candidate for Kodi 20 'Nexus' was rolled out to testers a month ago and today the full, finished version arrives. This is the first release in a while that clears all known blockers, meaning it becomes available for all platforms.

Kodi 20.0 'Nexus' brings a wealth of changes, fixes and new features to the popular home theater software, including support for multiple instances of binary add-ons, AV1 Video support, and a massive rework of the subtitle system.

The team says: "With over 4,600 commits since v19 'Matrix' was released on February 19th, 2021, this has been a huge effort. Thanks go out to our team members, and everyone in our community who sent a pull request, tested and gave feedback, or provided support to users on the forum. We appreciate your contribution to making Kodi better."

The Kodi Foundation lists the following highlights of the new version:

• Multiple Instances of Binary Add-ons This allows Kodi to load multiple instances of a binary add-on. For example: TVHeadend users can now run more than one instance of the add-on to connect to multiple back-end TVHeadend servers, with individual settings like channel groups and hidden channels maintained per add-on instance.
• AV1 Video Support Several Kodi platforms now allow hardware decoding of AV1 media. The Inputstream API has been updated to support AV1 and this allows add-ons using inputsream.adaptive to play AV1 streams.
• Subtitles Rework Massive rework of the subtitle system was undertaken and Kodi now supports dynamic positioning of fonts, changing of border and background colors, subtitle positioning, improved multi-language support, and more.
• Game (libretro) Savestate Support The GSOC 2020 project received some polishing touches before finally being merged. This feature allows you to save game state at any time, even if games do not provide native savestate features themselves.
• Windows HDR Support Full HDR support for the Windows Desktop platform has been implemented along with many improvements throughout the Windows (DXVA/2) video pipeline. HDR is not available on non-Desktop, i.e. UWP Store (Xbox) versions. Improvements to allow more accurate ACES Filmic and HABLE tonemapping make even SDR video look better, and these capabilities are implemented for both UWP and Desktop versions of Kodi.
• NFSv4 Support Changes to allow NFSv4 support were implemented as previously Kodi only supported NFSv3. There are some caveats with this (you must explicitly select either NFSv4 or NFSv3 for a source).
• Context Menu Consistency Improvements to right-click/long-press context menu handling were made in numerous areas. This makes the function of the context menu much more consistent over different windows, and enabled some new capabilities like the playback of albums directly from widgets, series resume, etc. to be added.
• Behind The Scenes The majority of changes are "under the hood" and invisible to users but improve the stability, performance, and safety of Kodi. API changes have been made to evolve Python and Binary add-ons and bring new skinning features. There are updates to Kodi dependencies on most if not all Kodi platforms. Fixes from regular use of code static-analysis tools. Database migration fixes for a smoother update ... and lots more.

For additional information, you can check the Nexus Alpha to RC2 release announcements and review the GitHub changelog here.

The new build can be downloaded from here.