Kodi 21.0 'Omega' RC1 has arrived -- download it now

The Kodi Foundation recently detailed the changes it made in Kodi 21.0 ‘Omega’ Beta 3. Now it has rolled out a new build which sees the latest incarnation of the hugely popular home theater software edging ever closer to being ready for prime time.

Today sees the arrival of the first Release Candidate for Kodi 21, and it comes with a long list of changes and improvements.

SEE ALSO:

• Kodi 20 'Nexus' gets yet another 'final' release
• This is what's new and changed in the latest new Kodi 21 'Omega' release
• Kodi 21 'Omega' hits a big development milestone -- download it now! [Updated]

Announcing the release, Team Kodi says:

This is a major release, so, as you'd expect, it comes with many new features. However, with a core change to FFmpeg 6.0, there is a very good chance that we'll get some regressions As such, please be aware that installing this will most likely break things, and we'd really like your help at that point to identify the problems and get them fixed. Please raise Github issues with full debug logs to help us resolve any issues that you wonderful testers come across.

This is what’s new in RC1:

Estuary

• A consistency fix was made by @Hitcher to make OSD controls for some buttons to just be disabled, rather than hidden, so the buttons stay shown in a consistent manner.

Filesystem

• A partial revert has been made that fixes some binary addons being unable to correctly parse some XML files.

General

• @ksooo continues to clean up things related to the Video Version feature. This time he has fixed a media name label that would be blank under certain circumstances.
• A first time contributor, @hagaygo, has made a fix to allow users to set a subtitle save path rather than using a temp location under some circumstances.
• @CrystalP submitted two fixes that fix list locations after adding/removing versions/extras and their art related management.

Music

• audiobooks were showing their last chapter with no duration; this has been fixed by @the-black-eagle.

Platform Specifics

• Android:
  • Cleanups to build/package files have been made by @joseluismarti. This helps get the codebase nice and clean for the newer Android SDKs leading into the future, meaning we can more easily backport to Omega when we are making changes for v22 "P" in the future.
  • @thexai has made a change that allows subtitles to be tonemapped to avoid extreme brightness for HDR playback.
• Linux:
  • @fritsch, our resident audio expert, has submitted a change to allow Pipewire to properly identify HDMI for passthrough usage.
• macOS:
  • @enen92 has implemented Hotkeycontroller for media keys on macOS. This allows Kodi to more accurately capture and handle media-related keys and allows us to play more nicely with other running apps on a system expecting to use the same media keys.
• Windows:
  • @thexai has submitted some colour accuracy changes for 10bit SDR/HDR colour mapping.

PVR

• A fix for icons not being correctly refreshed was made by @ksooo.

VideoPlayer

• @popcornmix has tracked down a variable initialisation bug that helps to reduce video stalls under certain conditions.
• A fix that stops incorrect refresh rate changes occurring for interlaced content in some circumstances was submitted by @CrystalP.

Known issues include:

• There are seek issues with multi-part MP4 files on Android (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/23673).
• We've had reports that the new splash screen looks like an OpenGL corruption; we know, it's not a problem, so don't panic. We'd be happy to have your artwork contributions if you'd like to work on an alternative.
• If remote sources are unavailable at startup, users are seeing significant delays while waiting (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/23958).

You can get RC1 from here. Select your platform of choice, and grab the new build from the Prerelease section.