Lately, there’s been more and more talk about getting in on cryptocurrency trading, and curiosity is at an all-time high. Why are people so interested? How much is there to gain from it? How does it all work? Well, there’s a lot you should know before getting into it, and going into it blind is leaving it all to luck, to say the least. Just like with any investment, you should make sure you’re properly informed on how it works, and make sure you can get as high chances as possible on your returns.
So what are cryptocurrencies? They’re a currency online that you can use for various purchases, which is their intended purpose. However, the main attraction of these currencies is the money that you could get back after investing in them. While a cryptocurrency might not be worth much at the time you invest, over the course of a day – it could skyrocket. When it comes to trading, you can simply look at it for its value to you, and how popular it is with other people.
How many are there?
When it comes to picking the right cryptocurrency for you, you certainly have your options to pick from. There are thousands of choices for you, but you only need to concern yourself with a select few if you’re trying to make something of them. You’ve most likely heard of Bitcoin or BTC, which is the leading cryptocurrency with the highest value, and then Ethereum as a distant second. Once these currencies would have been cheap to invest in, but now their prices are within the thousands. The prices of them can rise and fall frequently, so you have to be paying attention to the market!
It’s more or less gambling
When you’re investing in cryptocurrencies, you’re never guaranteed a return on your investment. While it might look promising to invest a lot into a currency that you believe in, that value could rise or fall depending on which point you invest. If you’re putting your money in at around the same time as everyone else – great! If you’re investing at the peak of its value – you’re about to potentially lose a lot of money. If you’re going to get into these kinds of investments, it’s better to make sure you’re not putting too much on the line.
Don’t invest too much at once
When you start out, it can be hard to decide whether or not you should be confident in your investments. If you’re only investing a small amount of money, it can help you to get used to it, working your way to more confident choices. As with anything, you can’t expect to be good at things straight from the bat, so it’s better to take it slowly! While you might be worried that if you invest a small amount, you’re going to miss out on a big spike in values, you should understand that will always be the case with any investment. It’s better to be safe than sorry in this case.
Make sure to do your research
One of the things you should make sure to do before picking is research. Putting your money into a currency that has gained no traction for a long time could be the equivalent of throwing your money away. There are many ways to find out about popular cryptocurrencies, and which might soon rise in value – so you should get yourself informed! It would also be a good idea to ask the question: When is alt season? As it can help you to make those cheaper and potentially riskier investments. If you don’t know what alt season is, it’s more or less the time in which the less popular cryptocurrencies start to see a rise in value. It’s good to know these things before choosing one of your own.
Where to invest
Where you choose to invest is important, as it’s going to dictate the reliability and access to your money. You should also be aware that there are some scam platforms out there, that are set up only to take your money instead. With that said, there are a number of secure cryptocurrency trading platforms you can choose from, and you’ll likely pick based on your preferences. Some exchanges will have higher fees, some will have a higher variety of choices, and some might even be simpler to use. The bottom line is, you should make sure you understand everything you should know before you start putting money in.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/6-Things-You-Should-Know-Before-Getting-Into-Crypto-Trading.jpg12451920Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2021-06-19 09:04:112021-06-19 09:04:146 Things You Should Know Before Getting Into Crypto Trading
Many of you will probably be aware that, since the dawn of time, each version of Kodi takes a vaguely sci-fi/fantasy/movie-themed name, in alphabetical order (Ed: no, don’t ask what happens after we get to Z). This has become common practice throughout the IT industry – look at iOS, Android, Ubuntu, Intel chips, and similar: it provides a useful and friendly way to refer to a release without getting tied up in numbers and decimal points.
Anyway, over the past 13 years or so we’ve chewed through Atlantis, Babylon, Camelot, Dharma, Eden, Frodo, Gotham, Helix, Isengard, Jarvis, Krypton, Leia and Matrix … and, as we branch the code for the next release, it’s time to bestow a name on our next version.
We ran a thread on the forum (thank you to everyone for their suggestions), filtered them for repetition, our ability to remember how to type them, and general scandal, and then put the top community-suggested names to a Team vote.
While we’ve previously had very specific names, this one is perhaps a little broader in its reference.
So, is it…
A series designator for replicants?
An extra-dimensional realm that exists outside of space and time, visited by both Kirk and Picard?
A post-cyberpunk trilogy by Ramez Naam?
A dungeon in World of Warcraft?
The heart of every protoss settlement in StarCraft?
All of the above, and perhaps more?
Ladies, gentlemen, non-binary, non-human, and inorganic lifeforms… I give you …
Kodi 20 “Nexus”
< muted fanfare >
Don’t get too excited about a new version dropping any time soon, as 19.x “Matrix” is still fresh out of the oven. However, you now know what’s coming, and, if you’re inclined, you can now follow development of this specific branch.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/emily-morter-8xaa0f9yqne-unsplash-scaled.jpg17072560Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2021-06-08 02:04:362021-06-08 02:04:36The Votes Have Been Counted and Verified…
Today we are releasing a LibreELEC update to primarily fix Widevine, its that piece of software that allows playback of Netflix, Amazon Prime and other paid video services.
The new version of widevine (4.10.2252.0 or newer) is mandatory to keep it working after May 31, 2021. With that new version (that is taken from ChromeOS) all ARM devices need additional libraries to make it work again. Sadly its not that simple and some not too nice workarounds came in place to keep it working due changes at ChromeOS.
The Generic (PC / Intel / AMD / Nvidia) images need no changes.
Raspberry Pi 2, 3 and 4
For Raspberry Pi 2/3 and 4 we made the LE 9.2.7 images that work out of the box. Just update to it and it should work. We will not provide auto update to that version – you will need to manually update if you need widevine. No additional changes needed (check InputStream Helper add-on for widevine update 4.10.2252.0 or newer).
LibreELEC 10
Those changes are highly experimental and might causes problems. For LE10 we added the needed changes in a different way – if you don’t need widevine don’t do anything. At least LibreELEC 10Beta4 or a more recent image is required. If you are using 9.2 for Rockchip devices please update to LE10, there are no 9.2 images with that fix included.
You need to create a kodi.conf manually and add a parameter to make it work. Currently there are no plans to implement it differently to make these manual changes unnecessary due the missing overall testing.
How to make it work:
Edit the kodi.conf and add these change with the terminal
Project staff are available in the forum to answer questions and provide advice. Please remember this is a beta. We are expecting some minor bugs/issues to be found. If you have a problem, technical issues are best accompanied by system and Kodi debug logs – help us to help you.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/LE-92-and-LE10-fix-for-widevine.png184400Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2021-05-31 03:43:372021-05-31 03:43:37LE 9.2 and LE10 fix for widevine
The #libreelec IRC support channel on freenode has been moved to Libera Chat. The last month has seen a series of management issues on freenode that have precipitated a mass exodus of FOSS projects to alernative IRC services; mostly Libera Chat or OFTC. Our original intention was to simply open another #libreelec channel on alternative servers. Our project staff are not big IRC users and channel traffic is low, so presence on several servers wouldn’t be a big deal. However:
This morning the “new management” on freenode executed a hostile takeover of hundreds of IRC channels including projects and groups we have interests in. Channel operators were removed, devoiced, and where channels had been closed (after relocating to another IRC service) the channels were reopened to disguise their decision to move. Why? .. simply because they mentioned Libera Chat in the channel topic.
So far our own channel on freenode has not been impacted, but in the backstory to LibreELEC’s existence there are events where one person decided we were ‘his’ hobby not ‘our’ project, staff were banned or had rights removed from project infrastructure, and a series of unilateral decisions were taken against the clearly expressed wishes of the entire team. The authoritarian activities seen on freenode feel familiar.
Libera Chat is a non-profit organisation newly-created by the former freenode admin team with a governance structure designed to prevent anything similar happening again. That also feels familiar, so we are moving. See you there
LibreELEC 10.0 BETA 3 is released! bringing Kodi (Matrix) v19.1 to LibreELEC users. Changes from LibreELEC 10.0 BETA 2 are listed here. As discussed in the recent Upcoming Changes blog post it, the 10.0 release is a disruptive and limited hardware release. If you have not read the blog post – please do – because we are not releasing images for all hardware. In summary: this is a stable release for Generic (x86_64 PCs). Stable-Beta for Allwinner and Rockchip. Stable “Alpha” for Raspberry Pi 4 as the code is still very new. RPi 2/3 are still in development targetting an LE10.2 release. RPi 0/1 are discontinued. All others hardware is still in development and not in a state for formal releases.
** DO NOT UPGRADE! **
Yes, we mean that. The team are super keen for you to run the latest LibreELEC release but we recommend you clean install not upgrade an existing installation – unless you are upgrading from a recent nightly image, i.e. you are already using Kodi 19.
The two simple (but complex) reasons for this advice are:
a) Python3 changes in Kodi v19 mean 99.99% of add-ons stop working. Most official Kodi add-ons now have Matrix compatible versions in the Kodi repo, but the transtion to them is not always smooth. Incompatible Python2 add-ons are disabled automatically on upgrade and users need to find/update add-ons to Python3 versions before re-enabling them. Banned/piracy add-ons are heavily impacted by the Python3 change, and while we don’t care about them breaking, we do care about the abuse that’s often hurled at staff when we refuse sympathy or support to that subset of users.
b) Kernel changes for RPi4 users combined with no release for RPi2/3 users and discontinued support for RPi0/1 users means signifant changes in the user experience (Raspberry Pi users are a combined 80% of our active installed base). We are pretty confident RPi4 users will like the update since it brings HBR audio and initial HDR video support, but it’s still a big change. Generic (where there is a lower level of change) and Allwinner/Rockchip (which already run on modern kernels) are less impacted.
SPARE CARDS AND BACKUPS
Using a spare SD card or USB stick to clean install onto makes “rolling back” in the event of problems simple. If you will reuse the same boot media, make a backup first and move it off-box so you can clean install an earlier release then restore from the backup. Kodi does not support in-place downgrades and it ever worked for you in the past it was luck not design (and Python3 guarantees problems this time). Your failure to make a backup is not our problem!
So unless you are already running an image with Kodi 19 inside, a clean install is preferred. We apologise for the inconvenience but we expect a much higher than normal support effort with in-place upgrades so it’s sensible advice.
CHANGES
You can read the official Team Kodi release announcement for Matrix/v19.0 here and (again) the recent Upcoming Changes blog post for more info on Kodi changes and the transition to GBM/V4L2. You probably (and hopefully) won’t notice, but every package that goes into the LibreELEC OS has been updated to a latest or recent release. It’s been two years since Kodi 18 was released so the changeset is too large to list. GitHub has the full history.
SUPPORT
Project staff are available in the forum to answer questions and provide advice. Please remember this is a beta. We are expecting some minor bugs/issues to be found and there will probably be a BETA2 release before we reach 10.0. If you have a problem, technical issues are best accompanied by system and Kodi debug logs – help us to help you.
So, here we go again. Nothing earth-shattering, just a quick note to tell you that the second Beta of Kodi 19.x “Matrix” is now available for installation.
If you want to know the main features in this release series, please refer back to previous blog posts, especially the Beta 1 announcement: this is entirely a bugfix release, so – as befits a second Beta – there are no new features over Beta 1.
By this stage, there should be no show-stopping bugs, and this release should be pretty reliable – just make sure you know how to roll back, just in case. Please: install, test, and give us clear feedback on any issues you uncover, either with the new features or perhaps with a regression in existing code. We can then work to resolve these before we go to full release.
You can get Beta 2 from here, or – if appropriate – our nightly PPA here. If you’re on Android, you can enrol in our Beta programme and get updates directly from Google Play.
As usual, you can also see changes since Beta 1 here or browse the merged PRs here.
Right now the Remote Chaos Experience (RC3) is already running at full steam as virtual replacement for the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37C3) that was supposed to be held in Leipzig, Germany, at exactly this time.
While we did not register an official assembly, some Team Kodi members are roaming around the RC3 world and we will use the opportunity to hold a short “What’s new” presentation plus Q&A session on the last day of the congress. The exact date and time is Wednesday, 30th December, 2 p.m. CET.
The event is over and the recording is available on YouTube.
In June 2020 some suggestions on improvements to our add-on system were suggested by Matt Huisman and some minor changes were implemented. Who knew at the time but this turned into much more work both cleaning up the current add-on system and adding numerous new features. The main goal of this became to improve the add-on user experience and add security features in order to prevent add-ons and repositories from being misused by bad actors.
The main problems were founded in the initial design of the add-on system, which doesn’t distinguish between official and third-party repositories. This allows a mixup of installing and updating add-ons based only on their version information, regardless of their origin.
In order to tackle these issues and make the add-on system more robust as a whole, the following cornerstone changes were implemented to the add-on subsystem:
The official Kodi add-on repository and its origin – kodi.tv-mirrors – are now defined as such. This repository contains all add-ons approved by Team Kodi.
Proper update rule restrictions were set up, which means official versions will be preferred during update over non official. Additionally add-ons are now bound to their origin to stop cross-updating and mixing of official and third-party add-ons.
Add-ons now stick to their origin for automated updates – this means the end user still has the freedom to choose between official or third-party add-on, they’d like to use, but updates will no longer switch from official to third-party and vice versa based solely on the highest version number.
Add-ons that do not originate from a repository (e.g. zip- or manually installed) will no longer receive updates. I.e. they will be pinned (Add-ons from an official repo are an exception to this rule).
General improvement of pinning mechanisms. Add-ons downgraded to a lower version within their origin don’t get auto updated until they’re switched back to their latest version.
Improved migration process – add-ons marked as incompatible during migration can be auto updated on the next Kodi startup.
The subsystem work allowed the following GUI changes to be implemented:
You can now see the origin of add-ons and their pinning status (especially use in the All Repositories view).
You can see whether or not an add-on was (or will be) installed from a repo (and if that repo was official) in all views.
You can see if an add-on was installed from zip or is a system add-on in all views.
Many other UI consistency fixes around add-ons.
Lastly there were many, so many long time bugs and inconsistencies that came to the surface while doing this work, and all these that we know about so far have been fixed. In the end, the user experience of the add-on system shouldn’t change too much, but should be a more enjoyable overall.
Here are some of the things we would like to tackle in V20:
Signing of add-ons: the ability to identify an author across multiple repos. This enables things like trusted beta repos etc. Call for volunteers on this one, we don’t have any in team experience on cross platform signing!
Sandboxing of binary add-ons: Prevent binary add-ons from crashing Kodi
Navigating add-ons: Better tagging, and searching of add-ons.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Refactoring-of-the-Add-on-Subsystem.webp.webp00Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2021-05-16 06:01:282021-05-16 06:01:28Refactoring of the Add-on Subsystem
And, off we go again. The dust settles on the festive season, so it’s time for another pre-release to hit the streets… we’re getting close to final release now, so we’re moving out of Beta and into RC.
If you want to know the main features in this release series, please refer back to previous blog posts: this is an iteration of previous Beta releases, not a feature release, remember.
This is stable, reliable code, suitable for daily use. Please, then: install, test, and give us clear feedback on any remaining issues, either with the new features or perhaps with a regression in existing code. As this is a release candidate, we think it’s basically ready to go, but let’s aim to make sure.
You can get this release from here or – if appropriate – our nightly PPA here. If you’re on Android, you can enrol in our Beta programme and get updates directly from Google Play.
As usual, you can also see changes since the last release here or browse the merged PRs here.
… yes, it’s here! After several iterations of alpha, beta and RC, Team Kodi is pleased to announce that Kodi 19.0 “Matrix” has just been formally released on all supported platforms. Dare you take the red pill, and find out how deep the rabbit-hole goes?
By the numbers, then, this version is the product of:
Nearly 50 individual open source developers contributed code
About 5,000 commits in over 1,500 pull requests since the first release of 18.x “Leia”
Over 5,500 changed files, with some 600,000 lines of code added, changed or removed
Countless hours of dedicated free time conceiving, designing, developing and testing (including all the infrastructure you see around them, including this web site)
… and, of course,very little travelling, obviously – that’s not good at the moment!
The broad list of new features is below, but – before we get to that – I’d just like to take a moment to say “thank you” to the huge amounts of work put in by the broadest team behind this release. Whether you submitted a few lines of code or a major new feature; whether you worked on video, audio, gaming, or a skin; whether you tested in pre-release and helped identify a problem, debugged an issue or updated a translation; whether you fixed some documentation, looked after the various systems that keep kodi.tv running, or helped to moderate the forum – thank you, one and all. Kodi is a community, and, without all of you, we would all lose something.
So, onward – what have we got. If you’ve been following the release cycle, you’ll have seen these already, but for people who only take final releases… hold on, it’s a long list!
Kodi 19 “Matrix” Features
Playback
For audio and music lovers, there are significant improvements across the board to metadata handling: library improvements, new tags, new displays, improvements to how Kodi handles release dates, album durations, multi-disc sets, and more. There’s a new, Matrix-inspired visualisation, there are improvements to display when fetching files from a web server, and several changes to how audio decoder addons can pass information through to the Kodi player.
For video, most of the changes are more technical, and may depend on your hardware: AV1 software decoding, HLG HDR and static HDR10 playback on Windows 10, static HDR10 and dynamic Dolby Vision HDR support on Android, and more OpenGL bicubic scalers.
For those who combine the two, and have libraries of music videos, you get some goodies as well: database and metadata display improvements mean that Kodi will now fetch and display related album and artist information from the music library, where appropriate. There are also new features around grouping videos by artist (not just album), support for .NFO files that list all performers instead of just the main artist, plus better search links to return related albums and videos by the same director director.
And, finally, if your definition of “play” is more game-related, we’ve implemented integer scaling to improve the viewing quality of Pixel Art games across the board, while iOS get support for Xbox, PlayStation and other supported Bluetooth game controllers.
Skin/Look-and-Feel
For many people, the interface is Kodi – it’s how you find your way around, it’s how you interact with the application and your media. As such, it’s always getting some attention, and this release is no different: screen redesign, especially for music; new metadata displays; changes to playlist views; a new “now playing” view; artwork and image file improvements; both new and updated GUI controls. Some changes may be subtle, but all are designed to improve your experience.
Subtitles
An often-overlooked feature, but immensely useful to so many people, subtitles get some attention in this release: timestamp overlays get fixed, plus you can now select a dark grey colour and set an opacity for the captions (particularly useful in HDR – protect your eyes, kids, you’ll miss them when they’re gone).
Addons and Scrapers
Python comes in for some major changes in Kodi 19. Because the old Python 2.7 has gone out of support, we’ve finally made the wholesale move to Python 3 and ported our addons across. Much of the community has come with us, so, hopefully, your favourite addons will still function, but we’re at the mercy of third-party contributors to update their work.
Kodi 19 replaces the old XML metadata scrapers with new default Python for movies and TV shows; there are also new Python scrapers for music, Generic Album Scraper and Generic Artist Scraper. Binary addons in general get improvements to system documentation, cleaned up settings dialogs, and better help text.
PVR and Live Television
Another significant part of Kodi that’s had a lot of attention in this release. Most new features here revolve around usability: PVR reminders, home screen widgets, group/channel manager enhancements, navigation and dialog controls, context menus, New/Live/Finale/Premiere tags, channel numbering and sorting, performance improvements, API improvements.
Security
There are a few new security features implemented now in Kodi, to help keep you safe from intentional or unintentional problems. Kodi will now enforce the origin of installed addons and their dependencies, which prevents third-party repositories from overwriting code of unrelated add-ons; broken or deprecated add-ons are now highlighted in the add-on list, so you have to actively agree to activate one; the binary addon system now has higher security around data exchange between Kodi and an addons. In addition, we’ve added a default requirement to password-protect Kodi’s web interface, plus give better information around the security implications of enabling external interfaces if you do choose to enable them.
Platform Specifics
As a cross-platform application, we try our very best to keep all platforms feature equivalent where we can. However, there are inevitably platform differences, and we also have to make room by dropping old platforms as technology moves on.
The big platform change with this release is new support for tvOS, but this means waving goodbye to iOS 32-bit. Beyond that, there are specific tweaks such as specific TopShelf support and fixes on AppleTV, better logging and notch support on iOS, and a move to a single Linux binary for multiple windowing systems (X11, Wayland, and GBM) versus the previous three. That last one will make a big difference to both users and package maintainers, since you’ll no longer have to select a different binary based on the target environment.
Behind the Scenes
Probably too hidden for many users, but there are inevitably changes and improvements that you can’t see, but might give more scope for new features later on: API changes to feed subtitle URIs to the player; multiple updates to various core modules; improvements to API calls and actions, and many more. They may not be important to you, but they took real work and I mention them for completeness.
Kodi V19 “Matrix” Gear
Why not show your support with a Kodi 19 “Matrix” shirt or hoodie? Or maybe a pillow to lounge on while you enjoy your favourite media? As well as just making you look utterly, fabulously, unquestionably cool, all purchases will make a small donation to the Foundation, and help keep everything running the way we all like it. All are available in a series of achingly-fashionable colours.
Changelog
For the terminally-curious, you can view the merged pull requests on GitHub. If you want to read back on the full history of v19 itself, or of previous versions, you can find the corresponding articles in the relevant blog posts.
Help Wanted!
If you experience any issues or find any remaining bugs, please post in the General Support section of our forum. If you have fixes for issues please submit a pull request with your changes to our master branch on GitHub. We also welcome users who want to help answer questions in the forum or write articles for the wiki.
Donate
To show support and appreciation for Kodi, please consider making a donation or purchasing merchandise such as a T-shirt or Raspberry Pi case. Your donations help us operate, covering operating expenses, hardware and software licences for developers, and legal fees, as well as paying for team members to attend industry/FLOSS events and our annual conference.
Availability
Kodi 19.0 “Matrix” is being pushed to the usual channels right now, so should be with your devices shortly. The exception is the Windows Store build for Xbox: this will, unfortunately, be delayed, and may even be subject to a future point release. x64 and x86 builds are going ahead, however, and will appear once they get through the store certification and deployment processes.
And, on that note, please remember that deployment on different platforms – especially curated “app stores”, as above – can vary wildly due to circumstances outside of our control. It may thus take a few more days to appear everywhere, so just hang on until it gets to you.
