This is what's new and changed in the first new Kodi 22 'Piers' release

It’s been two weeks since the Kodi Foundation rolled out the first alpha release of Kodi 22 'Piers', the latest generation of its hugely popular home theater software.

At the time, it arrived with little fanfare and no details regarding what was new or changed in the release. Finally, though, we now have a detailed breakdown of what's different in this 'significant' update.

The team says: “As you'd expect, it comes with many new features. However, it is also an alpha release, so there's a very good chance that something won't work the way it's intended to. As such, please be aware that installing this will most likely break things -- which is kind of the point of releasing it.”

What's new in Kodi 22 Alpha 1

Video/audio

• Upgraded to FFmpeg 7
• Audio book chapter support
• Movie Versions/Extras full redesign
• Movie Sets support setting info and artwork
• Better stream selection
• Automatic cleaning of cached images/artwork

Blu-ray multi-episode support

• New Blu-ray episode selection menu
• Blu-ray episodes now have their own progress, media info and artwork
• Library import/export now handles Blu-ray episodes
• Episode ranges are now supported and shown in the library
• Movie Versions/Extras are now supported for Blu-ray discs

PVR

• New Recently Added Channels (plus new widget)
• New Providers window (requires skin support)
• New Custom Timers
• Improved channel groups
• Improved saved searches
• Improved recording functionality
• Improved EPG search
• 1-minute EPG resolution (requires skin support)

Games

• Shader support (from Google Summer of Code 2017/2019)
• Improved mouse and keyboard support

GUI

• Reduced memory usage for single- and dual-channel textures
• Improved performance and memory usage on OpenGL and OpenGLES
• Improved large texture image quality with better performance on slow devices
• Implemented front-to-back rendering for better performance (OpenGL(ES) only)

Network

• Improved SMB GUI settings
• Support for SMBv2.0 devices lacking SMBv2.1 features such as "large MTU"
• Fixed connecting to Windows SMB servers with no password
• Drastically improved performance at listing large SMB directories

Platforms

• Windows/Xbox
  • Initial Windows ARM64 desktop support
  • Python 3.13 on Windows/Xbox
  • Enabled XAudio2 sink for Windows desktop (was previously only on Xbox)
  • Enhanced Video Super Resolution feature with 10-bit SDR support (Intel and Nvidia) and HDR10 (Nvidia)
• Android
  • Enabled file sharing to other apps and players
  • Improved channels on the home page
  • Upgraded to Android 15
  • Minimum Android version is now 7.0
  • Android support for 16KB page size
• LG webOS
  • New unified media pipeline
• Linux
  • HDR passthrough on OpenGL (was previously only on OpenGLES)
  • Support for the Wayland Color Management protocol, therefor supporting HDR on Wayland with compatible compositors
  • Make Kodi work on systems using a Turkish locale

Peripherals

• Improved OSMC Remote support
• Improved Pulse-Eight CEC Adapter support
• Improved Flirc support

Known issues

• Scanning for new content will fail if local NFO files are present (fixed for Alpha 2)
• Filesystems that use milliseconds can trigger a rescan

You can get Alpha 1 from here. Select your platform of choice, and look in the "Prerelease" section.

Photo credit: Andrey_Popov / Shutterstock