Kodi, formerly known as XBMC, is one of the most popular media center interfaces around with support for a wide variety of devices. The next Kodi 21 update is nearing completion, but in the meantime, the development team has one more update for the current Kodi 20 branch.
The development team for Kodi has just released Kodi 20.5, which aims to be “the final release for the Nexus line.” That’s what the developers said for the Kodi 20.3 update back in January, but a few more bugs were discovered that needed to be fixed.
Kodi 20.5 reverts many of the changes for controller support that arrived in the 20.4 update, because they caused “massive failures on Android devices.” It also fixes a bug that caused Kodi to close on Android devices during potential color mode changes, and audio playback has been improved to match the upcoming Kodi 21 Omega update.
The update also includes support for the “inputstream.ffmpegdirect” addon for Kodi on iOS and tvOS, and brand colors have been added for the Flathub store on Linux and potentially other software repositories. There are also a few minor fixes in the libraries used by Kodi.
The Kodi team said in a blog post, “As this is a point release, there are no major changes since the previous version, and you should be fine to install this straight over the top of any existing Kodi 20.x installation – indeed, this will happen automatically on many platforms. However, as for all software installations, back up your userdata beforehand if you’ve any doubts or have anything you can’t afford to lose (and definitely do this if you’re going for a major version upgrade).”
Kodi 21 is expected to arrive sometime soon, as it has been in beta testing for a few months already. It’s primarily focused on under-the-hood changes and making Kodi easier to improve and maintain in future releases. There are a few new features though, such as read and write support for M3U8 music playlists, improved Dolby Vision support, better passthrough audio format support on Linux devices, and some visual improvements for Windows.
Source: Kodi Blog
