DevCon 2026 – Barcelona Revisited – Part I

Well, hello everyone! It’s that time of year again, when your favourite development team rouse themselves from their long winter slumber and emerge, blinking in the light, to reconnect with their fellow creatures. Welcome to DevCon 2026!

We’re coming to you this year from about an hour outside Barcelona, which makes this a return visit. Not that it matters, I guess; you probably know how this works by now, so let’s get straight in …

As seems to be tradition now, we kicked off with a round of reminiscences – how long people have been team members, how they first got involved in Kodi, and past DevCon glories. Hey, don’t judge, we don’t get to see each other very often.

keith then gave a quick board/financial overview. The Kodi project remains firmly solvent, although we do get far less money from donations and sponsorships than once was the case. DevCon is our largest single expense, so we’ll almost certainly skip 2027 to make sure we can invest in hardware, hosting, Weblate, trademark fees and similar.

Speaking of trademarks, we’ve been working through many years of Foundation legacy, tidying up loose ends. It’s all long overdue, but there’s a chunk of legal and government costs there that we still need to incur.

We then moved onto a conversation about AI tools, options on the market, and their value – both relative costs and how they might work within the extended Kodi development ecosystem.

Next up, GSoC 2027 – how much do we want to participate, who might mentor, what potential projects.

razze then picked up a theme we’ve been watching for a couple of years now – the viability of moving from Slack to [matrix] as the latter continues to mature. One of the biggest challenges is the inability to migrate channel histories. As such, we’ll quite probably stay where we are unless we have some more compelling reason to make the switch.

Sticking with razze, we then switched direction to Flatpak and how that’s shaping up for future releases. We have some challenges about packaging add-ons, the resultant size of any downloads and what options we might have there.

Rewinding slightly, keith next lead a conversation about our existing use of AI, and our KodiAI tool. This is a home-grown capability that came about to get around the restrictions of mainstream tools, although it still uses those tools behind the scenes. We’re currently using this for PR code reviews and issues, but we also talked about future possibilities and where we might go next. We may well come back to this for a bit of a deeper dive over the next couple of days if time allows.

Moving on, garbear took the floor to update everyone on progress with Retro player and peripheral/accessory support. Those updates include multi-disc support to emulated games that came on more than one CD – effectively, a playlist. He also covered further work on video filters – a long-standing “coming soon” feature formerly known as shaders – and how they can be used to alter the appearance of a game in realtime.

While he was up, garbear then moved on to release management: some of the challenges we have with the 21.x series due to Android API bumps, and some of the plans for the release of 22.x alpha to beta to release.

Next up, yol took us through some server topics, specifically around current OS versions, implications and options.

A quick segue into upcoming conferences, events and similar, and we’re pretty much done for the night.

Take care, all, and we’ll see you again tomorrow.

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