It's finally here! Download Kodi 21 'Omega' now

It’s been a long time coming, but Kodi 21 ‘Omega’ is here, and ready for prime time. The latest incarnation of the hugely popular home theater software comes with a number of big new features and improvements.

The Kodi Foundation says there have been over 3,750 commits made since Kodi 20 'Nexus' was released to a waiting world on January 15, 2023.

This is what’s new in  Kodi 21 'Omega':

Major Features

FFmpeg 6

Kodi relies significantly on FFmpeg to do a lot of heavy lifting for us. Many developers have contributed to upgrading the project to make use of the newer FFmpeg releases over the past 15 months, initially starting with targeting FFmpeg 5, but later updating to FFmpeg 6.

DolbyVision On-the-Fly Profile Conversion

For our Android users, a fantastic contribution from quietvoid allows users to convert some less well-supported DV profile types to more well-supported profiles.

macOS Now Uses "Native" Windowing

Another change that has been years in the making. This was started by some amazing developers many years ago, and we have now been able to finally remove the last remnants of SDL library usage in Kodi. We now use native implementations for window displays on the Apple macOS platform.

A New Platform: webOS

A new platform can now run Kodi natively: a port to LG webOS TVs has been worked out by some amazing developers who have reverse engineered huge amounts of the webOS media pipelines. One of our newest team members, sundermann, has helped shepherd our newest supported platform, to extend the reach of Kodi to even more devices.

In-game Player Viewer

Controller configuration for games gets a little better in v21: a window has been added in-game to view which game port each player's controller is currently connected to.

Behind the Scenes

A large 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.

You can download Kodi 21 'Omega' from here.

Image Credit: Monkey Business Images/Dreamstime.com

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