Here we go folks: ramping things up, so we now have the first Beta for Kodi v20, “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 developers that choose to roll up their sleeves and fix an issue – thank you. 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.

Release notes

Addons

• Assorted binary addon fixes/updates – imagedecoder, screensaver, vis. Thanks to @AlwinEsch as always for the huge amount of work supporting Kodi’s addon interfaces.
• Fix/refactor “multi instance” GUI settings for addons. This work carries on from the PVR binary addons being able to have multiple backend instances (link).
• New id3 tag metadata stream support for PVR Radio addons (link).
• Add new SetVideoResolution with max resolution (link).

Database

• Clean DB was previously broken in earlier Nexus builds. This has now been fixed by @enen92 (link).

Disc

• Update libbluray to 1.3.2 for all platforms (link).
• Fix a “double free” issue when ejecting a disk (link) – Sidenote: thank you @prahal for your first contribution to Kodi core.
• Handle BD_EVENT_DISCONTINUITY (link).

Filesystem

• UPNP fixes for picture handling (link).
• First time contributor @ihipop improved support for subtitle formats when accessed via UPNP DLNA (link).

General

• Fix bookmark resume for .strm files (link).
• Fix jsonrpc Player.GetProperties response when playback from a widget is done (link).
• Fix race condition in CJobmanager causing crashes (link) – Sidenote: @neo1973 is our newest team member, welcome to the team!
• Application refactors. A large effort by @notspiff refactoring some very old code into more manageable chunks.
• Assorted improvements found by static analysis tools. Thanks @Rechi.
• Write correct duration to tracks in M3U playlists (link).
• Improvements to the header inclusions for a lot of areas of Kodi. This is a step to improve build times in general that mostly aims to reduce the number of components rebuilt when changes were made in a few extremely common objects. Thanks @notspiff, @ksooo.
• @rubpa has diagnosed and fixed a race condition in picture thumbnail loading (link).

Input

• Mouse cleanup (link).

network

• Another first time contributor @jjlin added support for HTTPS proxies (link).

Platform Specific

• Unix based platforms

  • Android and Apple platforms now ship with Python 3.11 built in. Python 3.11 is a very notable release due to considerable improvements in CPython regarding speed. Checkout the python release notes for more info.

• Android

  • Android builds will now be built as RelwithDebinfo by default for our Jenkins builds. This means nightlies and most other Android builds built by PRs will be with the more optimised RelwithDebinfo instead of Debug. This was done as some issues being investigated by devs was found to be purely cause by the slower Debug build types.
  • A number of improvements by @joseluismarti.
  • More class parameters have been added to allow more corner cases for starting android apps (link).

• macOS

  • Prevent crash on exit (link).

• TVOS

  • Sensitivity on the Remote has been reduced, and the tooltip and setting has been made more intuitive by @sy6sy2.

• Windows

  • Remember window position of Kodi when run in windowed mode (link).
  • First time contributor @sryze fixed a cmake warning for windows building (link).
  • A new setting to allow setting the peak luminance for a display (link).
  • Fixes to slow python usage on UWP platforms (eg Xbox) (link).

PVR

• Assorted EPG search fixes.
• Added possibility to browse available PVR client add-ons from PVR settings.
• Channels and Recordings now can be sorted by provider.
• Various fixes and performance improvements.
• Large refactoring improvements.

Favourites

• Replace favourites dialog with new favourites window, providing different views and other enhancements.

Skinning

• Added a new infobool System.Setting(hideunwatchedepisodethumbs) (link).

• Estuary specifics

  • PVR Channel Manager redesign.
  • Click on PVR Home screen section icon now opens Channels window again.
  • Some smaller changes to the PVR OSD.
  • Extend music context menu functionality, add ability to play albums directly from home screen.
  • Extend video context menu functionality.

Subtitles

• Fix for 3D MVC subtitles not appearing correct when frame packed (link).

Video

• Inputstream support for AV1 codec (link).
• Don’t attempt to use hardware AV1 decode if forcing software decoding. This fixes AV1 thumbnail generation on devices that don’t support AV1 hardware decoding (link).

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

This is the first Beta release of 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 Beta 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 Alpha 3 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 blogs, go to our website to catch up on them here.

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Hi, everyone! I am Mohd. Shaheer, Computer Science undergrad in freshman year. I am a GSoC contributor working on the project “Finish the web interface” for Kodi. I have been working on this project for the past 3 months. This blog post contains my experience through phase 2 (Final evaluation) of GSoC and an overview of my work during that period.

In my previous blog, I wrote about my work up until the mid-evaluation of GSoC. You can find it here.

Phase 2 (July 25th — September 5)

This phase turned out to be more challenging than the previous one.
During this phase, the first functionality I worked on was “Implementing the Video playback” which involved working on the following pages — Music Video, Movies, Tv Show, Seasons, and Episode.

I started with the videoid_int page, which contains information about a music video. Before that, I noticed that we didn’t have a working Music video page (previously implemented). There were some inconsistencies with its routing, with the json-rpc calls which fetched the metadata and with elm json decoders. So, I fixed these issues first.

I worked on the front end and created its UI from scratch which included rework of the music-video card UI. The basic approach in order to implement video playback functionality was by using JSON-RPC Files.PreparedDownload method, we can get a PreparedDownload path for the file which we want to play by making a request in this manner :

{"jsonrpc":"2.0", "id":1, "method":"Files.PrepareDownload", "params":{ "path": "/home/xyz/Videos/test.mp4" }}

We can expect the returned PreparedDownload path to be something like – "vfs/%2fhome%2fxyz%2fVideos%2ftest.mp4" which we can be fed into the src of the html5 video player
(“http://localhost:8080/vfs/%2fhome%2fxyz%2fVideos%2ftest.mp4”)

An issue arose when we tried to do so — CORS Policy. Since we were sending an HTTP request to fetch the JSON data from the Kodi RPC server, we were facing issues with it. Therefore to work on it during development, I suggested using an extension in a browser that allows CORS. Web sockets, which were used to retrieve json data, could have made things much simpler, but during development, things don’t always go according to plan :).

Videoid_int page

In Chorus 2, the video playback was done through a pop-up window that had an HTML5 Player. To make the user experience better, I implemented a modal for it.

In a similar manner, I implemented the video playback functionality for the movideid_int page where I implemented the page’s UI from scratch, worked on its routing, modified json decoders, and created new ones from scratch.

movideid_int page

Tvshow pages required more time and effort than others. I implemented its UI, front-end, and backend from scratch. I also had to create two new pages from scratch — The seasons and the Episode page. I created new objects and decoders for each of them and wrote JSON RPC calls to fetch data for them.

Tvshowid_int page

Season page

Episode page

Another functionality that I worked on was “Filter functionality” for all the pages. I created a fully working front-end and wrote filter methods that would filter the objects based on particular fields such as genre, artist, album, etc.

Filter functionality + reworked Movie card UI

While working on the functionalities, I also reworked the UI of previously implemented cards and pages. For example:

Top Music Page

Before

After

Album page

Before

After

On September 5th, the official coding phase of GSoC ended. It was a great learning experience and my first internship in freshman year. I learned a lot and would love to keep contributing to Kodi on this project and help in any way possible.

Again I would like to thank my mentor – Razze 😄 – and Kodi Community for being so supportive, and helpful, and for making sure to give positive feedback about my work which kept me motivated.

This post was originally published on Medium.

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