Protect up to 10 Devices for Only $1 per Month with Ivacy VPN

Ivacy VPN is a popular VPN service provider that has been in operation since 2007. With over 5700 servers in more than 100 locations worldwide, Ivacy VPN offers users the ability to securely access the internet and protect their privacy.

Recently, Ivacy VPN announced an incredible offer for their 5-year plan, which is available for just $1 per month. This is a significant discount from the regular price of $9.95 per month, offering users an opportunity to save big on their VPN subscription.

With the 5-year plan, users can enjoy up to 10 simultaneous connections on a single account, which means that they can protect all their devices with just one subscription. This is especially useful for families or small businesses that require multiple connections to secure their online activities.

What are the features of Ivacy VPN?

Ivacy VPN offers a range of features that make it an attractive choice for users who require a secure and private internet connection. Some of the key features of Ivacy VPN include:

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Ivacy VPN offer $1

Why should you consider the 5-year plan?

The 5-year plan offered by Ivacy VPN is an excellent option for users who want to save money on their VPN subscription. With the discounted price of just $1 per month, users can enjoy all the features of Ivacy VPN for a fraction of the regular price.

In addition, the 5-year plan offers up to 10 simultaneous connections on a single account, which means that users can protect all their devices with just one subscription. This is a significant advantage, especially for families or small businesses that require multiple connections.

Conclusion

Ivacy VPN is a reliable and feature-packed VPN service provider that offers users a secure and private internet connection. With the current offer of $1 per month for the 5-year plan, users can save big on their VPN subscription while enjoying up to 10 simultaneous connections on a single account. If you are looking for a reliable and affordable VPN service provider, Ivacy VPN is definitely worth considering. For more: https://dimitrology.com/recommends/ivacy/

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Kodi 20.0 "Nexus" – Release



It’s Time! We are pleased to present the latest release of Kodi, v20 “Nexus”.

With over 4,600 commits since v19 “Matrix” was released on February 19th, 2021, this has been a huge effort. Thanks go out to our team members, and everyone in our community who sent a pull request, tested and gave feedback, or provided support to users on the forum. We appreciate your contribution to making Kodi better.

Let’s review some of the changes you can expect:

Major Features

Multiple Instances of Binary Add-ons

This allows Kodi to load multiple instances of a binary add-on. For example: TVHeadend users can now run more than one instance of the add-on to connect to multiple back-end TVHeadend servers, with individual settings like channel groups and hidden channels maintained per add-on instance. @AlwinEsch was the developer behind a lot of this, with support from @ksooo. Your favourite binary add-on may not support this capability yet, but we hope add-on developers introduce this into their projects soon.

AV1 Video Support

Several Kodi platforms now allow hardware decoding of AV1 media. The Inputstream API has been updated to support AV1 and this allows add-ons using inputsream.adaptive to play AV1 streams.

Subtitles Rework

Massive rework of the subtitle system was undertaken by @CastagnaIT making subtitle formats more consistent for development and maintenance, and enabling features that were previously not possible. Kodi now supports dynamic positioning of fonts, changing of border and background colours, subtitle positioning, improved multi-language support, and more. If you are a regular user of subtitles, jump on in and check it all out.

Game (libretro) Savestate Support

The GSOC 2020 project of @NikosSiak received some polishing touches before finally (!) being merged. With mentoring from @VelocityRa and @gusandrianos, and the assistance of @garbear, this has been a long time coming. This feature allows you to save game state at any time, even if games do not provide native savestate features themselves. Great for gamers, and times when you aren’t watching Videos with Kodi ;)

Windows HDR Support

Full HDR support for the Windows Desktop platform has been implemented by @thexai along with many improvements throughout the Windows (DXVA/2) video pipeline. HDR is not available on non-Desktop, i.e. UWP Store (Xbox) versions. Improvements to allow more accurate ACES Filmic and HABLE tonemapping make even SDR video look better, and these capabilities are implemented for both UWP and Desktop versions of Kodi.

NFSv4 Support

Changes to allow NFSv4 support were implemented by @lrusak as previously we only supported NFSv3. There are some caveats with this (you must explicitly select either NFSv4 or NFSv3 for a source). Give it a try!

Context Menu Consistency

Improvements to right-click/long-press context menu handling were made by @ksooo in numerous areas. This makes the function of the context menu much more consistent over different windows, and enabled some new capabilities like the playback of albums directly from widgets, series resume, etc. to be added.

Behind The Scenes

The majority of changes are “under the hood” and invisible to users but improve the stability, performance, and safety of Kodi. API changes have been made to evolve Python and Binary add-ons and bring new skinning features. There are updates to Kodi dependencies on most if not all Kodi platforms. Fixes from regular use of code static-analysis tools. Database migration fixes for a smoother update … and lots more.

There are too many individual changes to detail everything. If you would like to know more, please look back through the Nexus Alpha to RC2 release announcements and review the GitHub changelog here.

Time does not stand still. Branches are forked and development on Kodi v21 (codename: “Omega”) is already underway. Thank you again for your continued support as we continue to make Kodi great!

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 (Nexus items will be available soon). 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 20.0 “Nexus” is being pushed to the usual channels right now, both our own download pages and various app stores/repositories, so should be with your devices shortly. It’s worth noting that, for the first time in a while, we’ve cleared all known blockers, so all supported platforms will be updated just as soon as the various app stores process things.



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How Anyone Can Stay Relaxed When Learning New IT Skills

How Anyone Can Stay Relaxed When Learning New IT Skills

When learning any kind of skill, you need a degree of patience and positivity throughout. You’ll never get what you want if you rush everything and become stressed after every little bit of adversity. Everybody starts at the very bottom and with no knowledge. You cannot expect to be amazing at something when you have barely learned the basics or even understood what it takes to get to the top. Regarding learning new IT skills and understanding new gadgets, this kind of thing can become even more intensified due to the tedious nature of some aspects. If you do not have patience and you do not get into the right habits, you’ll never get what you want out of this kind of thing.

Fortunately, learning IT skills and becoming more together with the 21st century can be easier than you might initially think. By no means do you have to tie yourself in not understanding some of the hardware and software. If nobody knew how to do any of this, none of it would exist and we wouldn’t have some of the most convenient pieces of technology available today. So, without further ado, here are some things you can do in order to make your journey a lot smoother.

Understand That Things Won’t Come To You Right Away 

Like with most skills in life, you have to recognize that things aren’t going to happen for you overnight. You have to go through all kinds of tedious tasks and you have to go through times when you’re simply not understanding what is happening. That’s all part of learning and it’s something that you’ll need to come to terms with. Thankfully, technology is extremely convenient in this day and age, so you won’t have to go through too many stressful times. If you’re able to build your patience and allow this learning process to work as it should, you’ll be a more skilled and IT-literate person in no time.

Make Sure You Have Solid Equipment And Software 

By no means do you have to possess the absolute best pieces of equipment in order to learn the quickest or to understand the most. It would help if you had some pretty competent and new pieces of hardware, however. Once you have something that can allow you to speedily understand something, it makes the entire process so much easier. Some people might argue that you’ll learn a lot more if you have fewer things at your disposal as you will not be spoon-fed absolutely everything, but the human mind will likely become more stressed due to the tedious nature of more difficult circumstances. If you prefer old-school methods and you don’t like the idea of getting new equipment, then that’s absolutely fine, too.

Keep Energized For As Long As You Can 

If you want to learn as much as you can, you have to make sure that your brain is constantly fed. You might be able to get a few pieces of information when you have hardly any energy but it makes more sense to make sure that you are fully energized. Be sure to get enough rest each night and to eat enough nutritious meals because it’s more than just your body that benefits from this kind of thing. When you don’t eat and you aren’t energized as much as you should be, you begin to forget pieces of information and your brain doesn’t move as quickly as you’d like it to. You’ll make mistakes along the way a lot more regularly and you’ll become a lot more frustrated.

Allow Breaks To Chill Out Regularly 

You can’t expect to work consistently all day like a machine. You are a human being and you have all kinds of flaws. If we could work all day, then our species will have created all kinds of special products and services that make our learning so much easier than it is right now. You need to make sure you have breaks to relax your body and mind in order to get the best out of your learning. Whether you like to simply rest, go to the gym, enjoy some Delta 8 Vapes, or do anything remotely related to relaxing, you’ll need to make sure that you get this sort of thing done. It’s nice and rewarding to work a lot and get things done, but you’ll get a lot more done if you rest.

Avoid Distractions That Can Deter You From Figuring Things Out

This is a pretty obvious point to make, but you’ll need to make sure that you are distracted when you’re trying to take an important piece of information. In this day and age, we all have products and other items that can distract us when we want to get things done. We might also be around people who want to stop us from doing what we are doing so that they may chat or do something unproductive. You have to make sure that your work area is devoid of distractions so that you can get the best out of your time. You’ll likely be working in a study or home office when doing this kind of thing, so make sure you aren’t distracted by your phone or any kind of game.

Stay Positive Throughout 

If you have the right mentality when approaching this kind of job, you’ll likely get the results you want. There are times during this kind of learning process when you might feel as though you’ll never get what you want and you’ll never understand certain aspects. If you believe that you will get what you want, you will likely stumble upon the results you want. It can be difficult to stay positive when all you want to do is get the results right away, but things do not happen overnight – as we’ve mentioned before. It’s amazing what the mind can do and it’s amazing how things can go well for you when you believe that they will. If you feel as though you’ll never understand certain aspects, the chances are that you will forever be wondering.

Don’t Stare At The Screen All Day 

 As somebody in the 21st century, you will have likely stayed at a screen for hours on end at some point in your life. Maybe you have played video games or you have stared at your phone for too long while talking to somebody or texting. You might have even binge-watched movies and TV shows. The chances are that you probably know this is not great for your brain and your body. When you’re trying to learn something and it’s not quite happening, you’ll need to make sure that you are not pinned to your screen all day because this can cause all kinds of problems in terms of productivity and health. Make sure that – even if you continue working – that it is away from the screen or even away from your workplace. You need to change things and add variety from time to time.

Boost Your Problem-Solving Skills Elsewhere

When it comes to IT skills, there tend to be lots of different things to learn. If, for example, you are learning to code certain things or you are hoping to build a website, you’ll have to make sure that your problem-solving skills are up to scratch. There are so many different things that can go wrong and you’ll need to find certain avenues in order to get the success you crave. Boosting problem-solving skills allows you to think outside of the box and to be a bit more creative with your ideas. If you have better abilities in this regard, your IT skills may come quicker than you first anticipated.

Work Together With A Friend Or Colleague 

Doing things on your own will not help you when the more tedious parts of the journey come along. When you are struggling, you’ll need something or someone to pick you up and motivate you. Having somebody alongside you can also give you more avenues in terms of exploring ideas. They will be able to tell you about certain aspects you are struggling with and you will be able to do the same with them.

Drink Plenty Of Water While Working 

You have to make sure that you are consuming enough fluids when you’re trying to learn all kinds of new things. If you’re trying to code a program or you’re hoping to create a website, you have to make sure that your brain is functioning properly. Being hydrated matters a lot so you have to ensure that you are drinking plenty of water while you are taking in new information. You’ll be cranky otherwise and you’re likely to give up a lot sooner.

Make Sure That Your Setup Is Comfy And Convenient 

You don’t need to have the perfect setup because that likely does not exist. You have to make sure that you have something that is suited to you and allows you to flourish. An organized space that looks pretty enticing will do an awful lot when it comes to motivation and productivity. If it’s clean, tidy, and devoid of distractions, you’ll have a wonderful place to pick up all kinds of skills.

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IPTV Smarters Pro Removed From Google Play Store by LaLiga Court Order

IPTV Smarters Pro Removed From Google Play Store

A court in Spain has issued a ruling requiring Google to remove the IPTV app “IPTV Smarters Pro” from the Google Play Store. As of today, only the “Smarters Player Lite” version of the app can be found on the Google Play Store.

LaLiga Targets IPTV Providers, Streaming Sites & Video Players

The request was made by LaLiga, the Spanish football league, and supported by UDEV, a police unit specializing in violent and specialist crimes, including national and international copyright cases. LaLiga is targeting both free web-based streaming sites and subscription IPTV providers as part of its efforts to combat piracy. These services may be subject to ISP blocking through the use of dynamic injunctions, which are designed to be flexible and effective in combating countermeasures taken by pirates, unless of course if you are using a VPN. Last year, LaLiga labeled a number of software video players as piracy tools, which has made the distinction between legal and illegal content less clear.

In a submission to the European Commission in February of 2022, LaLiga identified around 20 IPTV services and 30 streaming sites as unlicensed. In addition, the organization nominated more than 80 software video players, many of which are available for download on Google Play and the App Store, as facilitating piracy. LaLiga emphasized that these player applications enable the consumption of a wide range of audiovisual content, including sports, movies, TV series, and more, and therefore the problem affects the entire audiovisual and entertainment industry.

IPTV Smarters Pro On EU Piracy List

LaLiga submitted a list of IPTV services, streaming sites, and software video players to the European Commission with the aim of having some or all of them included in the EU’s Counterfeiting and Piracy Watch List 2022. When the report was released in early December 2022, only one of the most popular apps was included in the “Piracy Apps” section.

According to the European Commission, stakeholders from the audiovisual industry reported IPTV Smarters for inclusion on the Watch List as an IPTV turnkey solution from India. The company, which trades under the brand name WHMCS Smarters, offers website design and development, customized apps on various platforms, and a billing platform, as well as an IPTV media player through the IPTV Smarters Pro app. Despite not making any allegations of piracy, the Commission mentioned the WHMCS side of the Smarters business in the “Piracy Apps” section of the Watch List.

LaLiga recently announced the results of legal action it took against the IPTV Smarters Pro software. In a press release celebrating its anti-piracy efforts over the past year, the organization revealed that a court in Spain had issued an order requiring Google to remove the app from the Google Play Store.

On December 22, 2022, Investigating Court No. 53 of Madrid issued an order – after a positive report from the Public Prosecutor – whereby, considering the precautionary measures requested by LaLiga, it agreed to withdraw from the Google store (Google Play) the well-known player application ‘IPTV SMARTERS PRO’, which once installed allowed – according to the conclusions of a UDEV report – to view premium television channels in which LaLiga matches were broadcast among other content.

original source:https://www.laliga.com/noticias/laliga-finaliza-el-2022-ganando-varias-batallas-legales-contra-la-pirateria

LaLiga’s statement specifically mentions UDEV (Unidad de Delincuencia Especializada y Violenta), a specialist unit of Spain’s National Police, as the entity responsible for verifying that copyright infringement was occurring through the use of the IPTV Smarters Pro software. Based on this report, the public prosecutor requested and the court (Juzgado de Instrucción Nº 53 de Madrid) granted precautionary measures against the app. This process demonstrates that LaLiga requested the measures, UDEV provided evidence of infringement, and the court determined that such measures were appropriate.

In a DMCA notice, LaLiga accused the IPTVSmarters website of selling channel services or subscriptions to servers that provide unauthorized payment channel decryption keys for copyrighted broadcasts available through the IPTV/CCCAM service. However, the IPTVSmarters website claims that it is a software development company and does not provide or sell any subscriptions, streams, or content. The allegations made by LaLiga are specific, including specific URLs, and include pages that offer the Smarters app for direct download, forum discussions on how to pay for the app outside of Google, and pages related to user accounts.

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Kodi "Matrix" 19.5 Release



Happy Holidays, everyone! To celebrate, here we have release 19.5. This release caps off the v19 Matrix development cycle – we are not intending anything further now until 20.0 “Nexus”.

Without further fanfare, then I give you Kodi “Matrix” 19.5: more bug fixes, some backports, no real new features. Full changelog since 19.4 on Github, as usual.

Thanks, as always, to everyone who has helped us track down and fix any issues.

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 19.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).

If you’re interested, you can read the merged PRs here. 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.

Android/Windows Store Deployment

For Android specifically, please note that we are unable to provide this update via Google Play. An updated Google requirement demands that apps now target API level 31 (Android 12) as a minimum, while Kodi v19 targets API level 29 (Android 10).

As such, we’re unable to upload 19.5 to the Play Store, although 19.3 will remain available until 20.0 is available for the masses. However, for those who want the new release, 19.5 can be downloaded from our servers and installed manually.

More than that, though, for both the Play Store and Microsoft App store, there’s simply too much throwaway work. With the final release of v20 “Nexus” extremely close, as well as difficulties with the Google Play store submission for v19, there is no practical possibility to do store submissions for 19.5 – as such, this release will NOT be released on either Google Play or the Microsoft App store. As always, we provide the packages for all platforms on the Kodi mirror website if you wish to install them on your device.



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Trakt Is Back For All Apps Including KODI Addons

Trakt API Back Working Again

Since the latest Trakt crash, a lot of Video On Demand streaming apps and KODI addons stopped working or at best had limited functionality. Since December 20th though, Trakt got their API fully working again! The team twitted about it:

Trakt API is back online for all apps! We’re seeing a huge influx of traffic, but the servers scaled up to handle it. If an app isn’t working, please re-authenticate your Trakt account.

What is Trakt.tv

Trakt.tv is a website and community for tracking television shows and movies. Users of the site can track the shows and movies they are watching and share their progress with others. The site also offers recommendations and personalized suggestions based on a user’s watching history. Trakt.tv is very popular among users of media center applications such as Kodi and Plex.

What Exactly Happened

On December 11 at 7:30 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST) Trakt experienced a crash. The crash resulted in the corruption of some of the site’s data. The team at Trakt.tv worked around the clock to restore the affected data, but the process was very slow due to the large amount of data involved.

Now, with Trakt back again when connecting to the main website, there is a brief announcement by the team:

  • Data prior to November 7 is fully restored.
  • Watched history between November 7 and December 11 has been recovered. There is a separate message on your dashboard allowing you to review and import any recovered data.
  • All other data (besides watched history) after November 7 has already been restored and imported.
  • Some data might be permanently lost due to data corruption.
  • Trakt API is back online as of December 20.
  • Active VIP members will get 2 free months added to their expiration date.

How To Fix KODI Addons & APKs

Most of the third-party KODI addons and streaming applications should be working fine, but if yours isn’t working there is another step you might want to do. Some of the applications, especially KODI addons need to repeat the reauthenticate process with Trakt in order to work. And in some cases, or better still do it either way, you need to revoke authorization and then reauthorize Trakt again. In this way, you will be 100% sure that the service will work and your addon will too.

This is the case for Seren, an addon that absolutely needs Trakt in order to work. By using Trakt, Seren is sorting all kind of content: movies and tv shows. Even the search functionality didn’t work without it. But not that Trakt is back working again you should have no issues if you follow the method above.

Two Months For Free

Trakt added for all active VIP members 2 free months to their expiration date, a gesture for asking forgiveness for this disservice and a lot of users are super-happy again!

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Kodi Nexus RC 2



So… here we have a second Release Candidate for Kodi v20 “Nexus”. While we have a fairly small number of fixes, they are fairly major.

As always, thanks go out to all contributors for their work. We are nearing 4,000 commits since v19 “Matrix” was first released on February 19th 2021. For everyone that has contributed, both those in Team Kodi and all other devs that choose to roll up their sleeves and fix an issue. Everyone appreciates you for making Kodi better.

We also want to thank all those users who provide endless support on the forums, we appreciate you, and all the support anyone provides to our users.

Android Users

A note for any users who are running Kodi on Android 11+. Android has had a number of large permission changes that we, and all apps released on the Google Play Store, have had to adhere to. The major change is permissions to locally attached storage (i.e. USB disks). If you use USB storage for your media on these versions of Android, after first run do the following to allow Kodi access to these disks:

Go to Android Settings

  1. Apps and then “See all apps” (or just straight to Kodi if it’s in Recently Opened)
  2. Tap on Kodi
  3. Go to Permissions
  4. Files and media, and change to Allow all the time

We know many people use Nvidia Shield devices, so here’s a specific link to Nvidia customer help.

Add-on Devs

There was an API break after Beta 1 was released. The details can be seen on the forums (and of course discussed if any assistance is required) at https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=370707.

Essentially, if you use either the Python InfoTagVideo or VideoStreamDetail APIs, some functions had their variable names changed to bring consistency to the new set of APIs introduced earlier in Nexus.

We strongly advise users to always update to the latest test releases if you are on the bleeding edge, however if you are on older releases (e.g. Alphas or Beta 1), you may want to block updates on your add-ons as dev’s update their add-ons to target RC and the final V20 release.

Release notes

Database

  • A couple of fixes have gone in to resolve database migration issues from v19.
  • The first of these is the EPG database migration. This fixes the problem with the EPG loading and then disappearing. Thanks @ksooo for the prompt fix.
  • A second DB migration issue that only occurred on the Microsoft UWP platform (Xbox and UWP desktop) has been fixed by @thexai . This was an odd one, as the code that dealt with the failure was old code (6+ years). It was traced to an odd race condition that only manifested on the UWP platforms, however the root cause potentially could happen on any other platform.

General

Platform Specific

  • Linux

    • @popcornmix has fixed an issue for DRMPrime on Linux. This allows hardware formats like Broadcom 8-bit (SAND128) and 10-bit (P030) can now be correctly rendered with the latest Mesa.

  • macOS

    • A fix to allow Kodi to execute on macOS 10.13 has been made. We would still strongly suggest users use a newer version (10.14+), however this allows users still on 10.13 to run Kodi.
    • A regression for macOS reading actual disks was resolved by @enen92 . As part of this, the libcdio driver was also fixed to enable disk usage on Apple Silicon native builds.

  • Windows

    • A fix to a crash that only occurred on Windows Debug builds has been resolved. This didn’t affect users of the actual RC1 release, but Windows devs who would attempt to execute Kodi as a Debug build were quickly halted.

PVR

Teletext

  • Another Teletext issue has been resolved by @repojohnray. @repojohnray has contributed a number of fixes for v20 to help increase the reliability and safety of Kodi.

Although this was only a small number of fixes, they all help make the final release of “Nexus” better. Thanks to users who have provided issues and logs to assist with the resolution of these issues.

As always, and we are quite confident in its stability – however, always backup your configs before testing, and please let us know of any regressions or issues you find.

If you want to take the plunge, you can get RC 2 from here. Select your platform of choice, and look in the “Prerelease” section.

If you wish you can see all the gory details of what’s changed between v20 RC 2 and RC 1 here.
For further information on changes for the entire Nexus release so far, we have highlighted most of the major features/changes in the previous Alpha/Beta blogs, go to our website to catch up on them here.



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Which KODI Addons Are Still Working With Trakt Issues Ongoing

While Trakt service had its crash, a lot of streaming apps suffered. Plex, Jellyfin, and KODI are those suffering the most. Especially some third-party KODI addons are based on Trakt in order to list the two main categories (Movies and TV Shows) into different subsections like Trending, People Watching, Most viewed, and Lists.

Seren KODI Addon Not Working Because Of Trakt

The best example of this outage is Seren. An amazing KODI addon that is beloved among KODI users it is almost at a 100% based on Trakt functionality. Even though the addon is capable of working, which means playing the streaming content, the missed Trakt connection is causing the addon to not be working. In other words, if you do not have your content, whether it’s a Movie or a TV Show, in your Favorites, it will not be able to stream anything. Another way to bypass this issue with Trakt is using TMDB Helper and set Seren as the default player. But this is already an advanced setting for most users which I get it. The same goes for many addons, The Crew is another great example that suffered the same Trakt crash.

KODI Addons Working Without Trakt

trakt.tv logo

Some other third-party KODI addons, use some or even none of the features by Trakt. That means that they still work great or at least for the most part. Some use the IMDB service for listing Trending, Lists or Popular Movies and TV shows. A small list of such add-ons that you can use instead is:

When Back To Normal For KODI & APK

Trakt.tv stated that everything will be back working in a week. So all the related addons will come fully functional as well at the same time. This is also for any Streaming APK that have issues with displaying or searching movies and tv shows. The APKs have no issues apart from the related features based on Trakt. Everything will be resolved in a week’s time as the API of Trakt will be available and online again.

At the time of writing this article, if you try to Re Authorize Trakt on any given KODI addon or APK you will receive a 503 error. That is normal since, as mentioned, Trakt is down and only the website part of the service is actually working.

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Trakt Outage and Data Loss: What Happened and What’s Next

On the evening of December 11th, streaming service Trakt experienced a major outage when their main database crashed, causing significant damage and corruption to some of the data. In a statement, the company apologized for the extended downtime and any inconvenience this may have caused their users.

According to the statement, updates to Trakt’s automated backup systems have already been put in place and will be tested on an ongoing basis to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future. Data prior to November 7th has been fully restored, but the company is still working to recover the watched history from November 7th and beyond. While they hope to recover as much of this data as possible, it is possible that some of it may be permanently lost due to the extent of the corruption. The data is expected to be available for import next week, and the Trakt API will be turned on at that time as well.

trakt.tv logo

As a gesture of goodwill, Trakt will be offering two free months of membership to all of its active VIP members. It is clear that the company is taking this incident seriously and is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. They have assured their users that they will do better moving forward and have thanked them for their patience and understanding.

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Kodi Nexus RC 1



Here we go folks, ramping things up and we have the first Release Candidate (RC) for Kodi “Nexus”.

As always, thanks go out to all contributors for their work. We are nearing 4,000 commits since v19 “Matrix” was first released on February 19th 2021. For everyone that has contributed, both those in Team Kodi and all other devs that choose to roll up their sleeves and fix an issue. Everyone appreciates you for making Kodi better.

We also want to thank all those users who provide endless support on the forums, we appreciate you, and all the support anyone provides to our users.

Addon Devs

We’ll put this at the top of this post, as there was an API break after Beta 1 was released. The details can be seen on the forums (and of course discussed if any assistance is required).

Essentially, if you use either the Python InfoTagVideo or VideoStreamDetail APIs, some functions had their variable names changed to bring consistency to the new set of APIs introduced earlier in Nexus.

We strongly advise users to always update to the latest test releases if you are on the bleeding edge, however if you are on older releases (e.g. Alphas or Beta 1), you may want to block updates on your addons as dev’s update their addons to target RC and the final V20 release.

Release notes

Addons

  • A BREAKING API change was introduced for the VideoStreamDetail and InfoTagVideo Python APIs. This affects set APIs that were introduced in the v20 development cycle. We would not normally do such a change when we enter Beta phase, but we believe fixing this now would cause fewer issues for all the addon devs out there for v21 (supporting 2 different APIs for v20/v21). Details around what is affected can be seen in the PR.
    In addition, further details can be seen and discussed on the forums.
  • A number of bundled addons have been updated. This should reduce the number of addons that immediately do updates on installation of RC1.

Scrapers

  • Due to the above breaking API change, the TVDB TV Show scraper was updated to prevent breaking. The result is that the updated scraper will be broken on any Kodi v20 release prior to this RC1 release. If you are using an older v20 install, then you need to update for continued functioning of the TMDB TV Show scraper.
  • In addition, we took this opportunity to fix a long outstanding issue with the Python TV Show scrapers described here. The result is that if you are adding new episodes to existing TV shows in your library, you need to refresh the show to download the new episode guide. If you are using NFO files, the episode guide in those files needs updating also.
  • TMDB TV Shows and TV Maze scrapers have been updated, with TVDB v4 to be updated in the near future.
    More details can be found here.

Games

  • @lrusak fixed a crash that was introduced into Beta1. Some Linux users were finding Kodi was crashing on startup (link).
  • @lrusak again fixed a black screen issue with standalone games (link).

General

  • Add support for action “play” to many more items such as widgets/favourites on the homescreen (link).
  • Fix a regression with duplicate/incorrect context menu entries (link).
  • @ksooo fixed another regression for addons that caused the “continue watching” context menu not to show the resume time (link).
  • @repojohnray has been providing a number of fixes/cleanups lately that are targeting memory leaks. Subtitles and a number of Linux specific areas have had improvements made to them.
  • A new contributer @larrignon has fixed a logging message that occurred when an empty directory was searched by scrapers (link).

Music

  • Fix crash when queuing multichannel audio files. This fixes a regression introduced in Beta 1 (link).
  • Fix default fallback image to be more relevant to a music item (CD Case instead of a Folder) (link).

Platform Specific

  • Android

    • @joseluismarti has contributed a number of cleanups/fixes for Android.
    • @a1rwulf bumped our SDK target to 31. Along with a number of fixes @joseluismarti contributed over the past few months, this has allowed us to finally do a release to the Google Play Store. RC1 has been released to the Testing channel, and we’ll ramp up deployment over the next week or so to more users in the Testing channel

  • macOS

    • @enen92 has made a number of fixes to what is know as the macOS native windowing implementation. This won’t affect too many people right now, as the default release uses SDL windowing, however anyone building the native macOS ARM version (or using the test builds) should see a number of improvements around windowing.
    • Add speech to text service implementation (usable from keyboard dialog)

  • Windows and Xbox

    • Kodi RC 1 has been submitted to the Microsoft Store as an update. Users should start receiving this shortly. Be aware that you may have to uninstall and reinstall your Xbox version, because the OS is not updating cleanly.

Skinning

  • Fix a crash if an include has an empty condition. This was reported by @jurialmunkey and was an effect when a PARAM was used in the include condition that may have been empty (link).

  • Fix a crash that could occur in the event of a textbox that was too small for a font used, and therefore the text would not fit (link).

    Estuary Specifics

    • Music: Extend context menu functionality, add ability to play albums directly from home screen
    • Video: Extend context menu functionality
    • PVR: New home screen widget for saved searches
    • PVR: Reworked home screen widget for timers
    • PVR: Some smaller visual changes to the OSD and the home screen widgets
    • Add possibility to use the play button (on remote, keyboard, …) to start playback of many different items shown on the home screen (e.g. songs, movies, episodes, Live-TV channels, recordings, albums, TV shows, single seasons, movie sets – just try it out…)

Subtitles

  • Fix a regex for Sami subtitles (link).

Teletext

  • @enen92 has made a few fixes for teletext usage. A crash and a usability issue were resolved (link).
  • Another crash was resolved (link).
  • Flashing teletext was blinking at an extremely fast pace. This fixes an regression introduced by a large core change regarding time related functions (link).

UPNP

  • Fix some crashes occurring on startup if UPnP items were on homescreen widgets. Check the PR for gritty details (link).

Video

  • A new feature has been introduced to allow the possibility of ‘continue watching’ (aka resume) for certain video folders from the context menu of several folder locations (eg Movie Sets, TV Shows including seasons, and more). The best way to see more info about this is to see the PR.

PVR

  • Multi-instance support for PVR client-addons (first implemented by pvr.hts, more to come)
  • Persistent EPG searches
  • Automatic cleanup of texture database and removal of related stale image files
  • Add possibility to refresh channel logos in the Channel manager
  • Selection of items to delete when resetting the PVR database
  • Various performance optimisations, larger code refactoring

Favourites

  • New favourites window, providing different views and other enhancements

Thank you once again to everyone who has contributed to this release.

This is the our first Release Candidate for Nexus, and we are quite confident in its stability – however, always backup your configs before testing, and please let us know of any regressions or issues you find.

If you want to take the plunge, you can get RC 1 from here. Select your platform of choice, and look in the “Prerelease” section.

As usual – well, it is open source – you can see what’s changed between v20 RC 1 and Beta 1 here.
For further information on changes for the entire Nexus release so far, we have highlighted most of the major features/changes in the previous Alpha/Beta blogs, go to our website to catch up on them here



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