Kodi 18.1 ‘Leia’ RC update released with new features (Download)

Kodi is a freeware and open source media player which is popular among many users for its whole host of nifty features and streaming media content across every platform. Kodi offers its services among a vast majority of platforms such as macOS, FreeBSD, Linux and many more.

However, as an open source platform, Kodi tends to roll out new updates now and then. And if we remember then the last update of Kodi v18.0 was there from two weeks back and arguably, there always remains a curiosity to get more. Although every update doesn’t bring new thing onto the table, however, final release always has some unexpected bug fixes or improvements, and which often requires time to get stable. In an Official Note, Kodi announced that it would bring the update for the regular stable version of Kodi v18.0 which will incorporate several improvements and bug fixes.

The v18.0 ‘Leia’ T-shirt

Keeping the theme of the Galaxy far, far away in mind Kodi’s resident artist attempts its new announcement video design, which later turned out to be one of the unique and intriguing announcement videos of all time.

The video work was so praiseworthy that Kodi took it to the next level by modeling the Kodi v18 T-Shirt. Here are the insights of the new K-18 T-shirt which is not confined to black & white but has the option to choose from multiple colors.

Kodi 18.1 Changelog

Pi Case v2 Kodi gen2_10-23-18.131

Kodi v18.0 stable update release full list of the changelog is here in this wiki page, and for more insights from a technical perspective refer to this merged pull requests on GitHub.

However, in this Kodi v18.1 version there are many significant changes made which are as followed:

  • Speed up Player and Playlists operations with JSON-RPC
  • Define a senseful default value for advanced settings ‘updateemptytagsinterval’
  • Revert edge case crash fix that caused DVDs to be not recognized on Mac OS
  • Remove “dxvaallowhqscaling” advanced setting to prepare for DXVA improvements in v18.2 for Windows
  • Linux X11: fix usage of required configuration values
  • Add date to the log records
  • Don’t react on DPI change event on Win10 >= FCU
  • Fix Android MediaCodec freeze when early disposing stream
  • Flush stream players if abort is requested which solves waiting too long. Skippingskip DVD screens for example
  • Fix ListitemAbsolute and ListItemPosition in GUI engine
  • Ignore very first “server not reachable” notification for PVR servers
  • Use extended result codes for SQLite
  • Fix invalid PTS decoder value which should improve MPEG2 playback on Android devices
  • Update SSL CA trust store
  • Handle empty vertex buffers in GUIFontTTFGL which caused a hard crash
  • Reintroduce setting “Close channel OSD after switching channels” for PVR
  • Fix thread logging on Android which causes issues like gettings frozen on DVD/Bluray playback
  • Avoid attempt to load music info for smart playlists
  • Fix Top 100 Albums regression
  • RenderCapture: Only query Occlusion if GL lower 1.5
  • Check current mode if whitelist doesn’t match and take the correct action
  • Check if app intent is valid on Android. This fixes a hard crash when trying to open Kodi again
  • Fix PVR input stream creation for PVR file items only containing a path and no recording/channel tag.
  • Fix for playing VP9 streams using the input stream addon. It failed because extra codec data is not existent for this stream codec.
  • Catch an exception while reading or writing a file
  • Fix logical “or” operation in GUI engine
  • Check the system capabilities to support sleep states S1/S2/S3/S4 before reporting them as available
  • Fix crash in PCSX ReARMed with BIOS
  • Several Estuary cosmetic fixes

Changelog of v18.1 RC1 is also available here in GitHub Milestone. You can download the Kodi 18.1 RC1 for almost every major operating system from here via going to the Pre Release section.

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