Kodi 21.3 Omega Release – Features, Updates, & Install Links

Kodi has officially launched the stable version of Kodi 21.3 Omega and this article explains all the latest features and updates.

Provided below is the changelog including features, fixes, and general update information. If you wish to install this version of Kodi 21.3, use our download guides provided below.

The most popular Kodi device is the Fire TV Stick 4K Max and here’s a video that shows how to install the latest release onto this device.

Get the best Kodi Addons for 21.3 Omega with the TROYPOINT Supercharge Guide!

Get Free TROYPOINT Supercharge Kodi Guide

Kodi 21.3 Omega – Features & Updates

According to the Kodi development team, version 21.3 was already announced to other channels, but now it’s here for everyone. In terms of future updates and version 22 ‘Piers’ here is a statement from the development team:

“While work is well underway on our next major release, with Alphas already out for Kodi 22.x “Piers”, this doesn’t mean we’ve given up on 21.x “Omega”, as that’s very much still our current release. So, with minimal fanfare, we present to you a package of changes, bug fixes and backports that we like to call Kodi 21.3 “Omega”. 

Provided below is the complete change log pulled directly from the official announcement from Kodi. You can also see the full details on the Github Page to compare releases.

Release Summary

Below are the important details of the 21.3 release:

Video

• Added HDR support on Xbox One
• Fixed Blu-ray playback on Linux
• Fixed audio/subtitle issues when resuming Blu-rays
• Fixed handling of HDR10 light metadata changes
• Fixed subtitle selection for ISO 639-1 (two-letter) language codes

Library/Sources and Management

• Improved speed of video library rescans
• Fixed multi-episode files overwriting the first episode
• Fixed info dialog for certain Movie Versions
• Fixed some false positives detecting Movie Versions

Music

• Fixed CDDB lookups using Gnudb.org’s CDDB API
• Fixed album search failing for artist names

Audio

• Fixed rare Pipewire crash when connecting/removing audio devices

PVR

• Fixed crash when a PVR stream is stopped via remote app

Peripherals

• Added support for Turkish keyboards on Linux
• Fixed enabling and disabling Pulse-Eight CEC adapters
• Fixed the Delete and Alternative Insert keys on macOS
• Fixed minor visual glitches when managing peripherals

Addons

• Fixed updating add-ons after 25 days of inactivity (extended to ~68 years)

Skin/GUI

• Fixed busy dialog crash when multiple dialogs are opened
• Fixed suspend dialog remaining open after the system wakes up
• Improved touch support for slider dialog arrows

Network

• Added support for HTTP Basic Authentication
• Fixed some network streams failing due to interrupted HTTP/2 transfers
• Updated libnfs to v6 for embedded platforms
• Updated CA certificates to 2025-07-15 from the Mozilla CA certificate store

Kodi 21.3 Omega Download

The Kodi 21.3 Omega release can be installed directly through the free TROYPOINT Toolbox.

How to Use TROYPOINT Toolbox

Update Kodi on Fire TV Stick

Update Kodi on Android/Android Box/Google TV

Here are the download links as well.

Kodi 21.3 Omega – Android 32BIT

Kodi 21.3 Omega – Android 64BIT

Kodi 21.3 Omega – Windows 64BIT

Kodi 21.3 Omega – Windows 32BIT

macOS 64BIT

iOS 64BIT

Install Guide for Kodi 21 Omega – Linux

NOTE: For those interested in testing Kodi 21.3 Omega while still using a past release of Kodi, we suggest using the TROYPOINT Kodi Fork for multiple variations of Kodi on one device.

Kodi Fork by TROYPOINT

Shown below are previous versions of Kodi 21 Omega with detailed feature guides.

Kodi 21 Omega Release – Features, Fixes, and Updates

Kodi 21.2 Details

Library/Sources and Management

• Fixed a bug that ignored images in the ...\season\.actors folder. The \season\.actors folders have been deprecated and all actors are saved in the \TV Show\.actors folder. (forum, PR)
• Restore performance of movie addition to the library to v20 (Nexus) level (PR)
• Fixed/improved playback from some UPnP server software (at least UMS and Gerbera. Some NAS UPnP servers are based on UMS under the covers). Playback starts faster and multiple videos can be played consecutively. (PR)
• Preserve special characters in names of scanned or added movie extras (PR)
• Replace context menu items ‘Set actor/artist thumb’ with ‘Choose art’ to make it possible again to add/and set other artwork, not only thumbnails (PR)
• Fixed mark watched/unwatched operations missing in certain context menus (PR)
• Honour importwatchedstate and importresumepoint settings from advancedsettings.xml (PR)

Video

• Fixed HDR passthrough on video sources with partial or missing display metadata (only GL/GLES platforms) (PR)
• Fixed HDR to SDR tone mapping on video sources with partial or missing display metadata (only GL/GLES platforms) (PR)
• Fixed possible incorrect picture metadata if playing different HDR videos without stopping the previous one and the videos had different HDR metadata (all platforms) (PR)
• Fixed on Blu-Ray discs some BD-j menu items not displaying correctly due to multi-thread timing issues (PR)
• Fixed deletion of bookmarks in video if the video has also chapters (PR)

Music

• Fixed an issue with the last track duration of some albums stored in mka containers (PR)

Plugins

• Fixed missing context menu entries for plugin-provided items (PR)

Filesystem

• Restored the ability of enter credentials when browsing SMB shares (only POSIX platforms) (PR)
• Updated cURL to 8.10.0 to fix issues with FTP TLS sources (PR)

PVR

• EPG search fixes (PR)
• Fixed resume points for recordings not honoured (PR)
• Fixed ‘User has no access / server’ error if broadcasts have been shifted (PR)
• Fixed default select action ‘show info’ for PVR items (PR)

Skin/GUI

• Added Donation tab in System Settings (PR)
• In preparation for our next major release, we’ve been updating the translation strings in all 78 of our binary add-ons (audio, inputstream, peripheral, screensaver, vfs, visualisation…). These updates have now all been backported to this release, so there’s a bonus of a year’s worth of fixes and improvements here.

Android

• Greatly improved joystick support on Android (PR)
• Fixed possible crash when getInterfaceName method returns null (PR)
• Fixed resuming paused media playback not working via play/pause media key press (PR)
• Fixed black screen when resuming app from minimised state (PR)

Linux

• Fixed memory corruption when high quality video scalers are used (PR)
• Fixed possible infinite loop when using GBM and a DRM Atomic Commit fails (PR)
• Fixed windowed Kodi becoming larger on every start when running on Wayland with a scale factor (PR)

OSX

• Fixed crash when trying to detect optical media (PR)

Windows

• Fixed the crash issue that occurred when accessing the computer using Remote Desktop Protocol (PR)
• Fixed the ability of the built-in WOL feature to wake up servers (PR)
• Fixed the potential crash occurred when the system contained environment variables name with a length of more than 64 characters (PR)
• Fixed HDR feature did not work on Windows 11 24H2 under some circumstances (PR)
• Improved support for WCG displays on Windows 11 24H2 (PR)

Kodi 21.1 Details

• [Omega][settings] Fix empty heading of input dialogs (keyboard, number, …)… by @ksoooin #25283
• [Omega] VideoSelectActionProcessor: On ACTION_INFO, if the item has n… by @ksooo in #25287VideoSelectActionProcessor: On ACTION_INFO, if the item has n… by @ksooo in #25287
• [BP][FileSystem] limit SMB chunk size to 64 KB for SMBv1 by @thexai in #25295
• [Omega][PVR] Timer settings dialog: When creating new timer rules without an… by @ksooo in #25302
• [Backport]Rendering: drop markwindow dirty after setrendergui change by @enen92 in #25165
• [build] fix missing include by @howie-f in #25320
• fixed: infinite loop parsing an invalid moving speed config by @notspiff in #25322
• [Backport] new TrueHD MAT packer code + move TrueHD packing to CDVDAudioCodecPassthrough by @thexai in #25312
• [Backport] [Android] Allow setting the VideoLayout view to transparent color by @quietvoid in #25335
• [Omega][PVR] CPVRClient: Request TV groups and members only if the addon sup… by @ksooo in #25333
• [BP][tools/depends] Bump rust 1.79 and add Cargo.lock files by @fuzzard in #25342
• [backport][CharsetConverter] Fix crash if iconv returns EINVAL by @enen92 in #25350
• [backport] Tuple: fix warning maybe-uninitialized by @vpeter4 in #25381
• [backport] libUPnP: Fix memory allocation of size 0 by @vpeter4 in #25375
• [backport][Windows] Fix rx6400 detection by @CrystalP in #25369
• [Omega] Python: Restore close of WindowXML when application exits by @garbear in #25399
• [Omega] Python: Fix hang at application shutdown by @garbear in #25400
• [Backport][AudioEngine] Make a smarter choice between PulseAudio and PipeWire by @neo1973 in #25252
• [Omega] [PVR] Fix Reminders update special cases by @ksooo in #25469
• [Omega] Fix bookmarks db persistence by @ksoooDo not show video info dialog if item has an empty video info tag by @ksooo in #25489
• Don’t change fileending to png – Backport by @razzeee in #25484
• Fix typo in strings.po by @Hitcher in #25490
• [backport][videodb][videoversion] Fix Leaks on Movie / Asset Removal by @CrystalP in #25462
• [Backport] Fix missing subtitle help tips by @Hitcher in #25492
• [backport][FileItem] Fix mimetype content lookup regression by @CastagnaIT in #25477
• [backport][DVDFactorySubtitle] Improved ASS format detection by @CastagnaIT in #25455
• [Backport][DirectSound] Fix buffer underrun for Bluetooth audio devices by @thexai in #25511
• [backport][GUI][X11] Fix deadlock on dialog renderloop by @enen92 in #25451
• [PVR] Group Manager: Do not show hidden channels in list of ungrouped… by @ksooo in #25550
• [Backport][Estuary] Fix watched icons for episodes & sets by @jjd-uk in #25554
• [BP] Bump Android SDK 34 + AGP 8.1 by @fuzzard in #25583
• [backport] KeyboardTranslator: Fix call to StringUtils::ToLower by @neo1973 in #25572
• [MUSIC] Fix separators so that artist sortnames split correctly by @the-black-eagle in #25557
• [Omega][PVR] Fix major design flaw to use std::hash value as persistent client UID by @ksooo in #25594
• [Omega] Change select action choose implementation to open the full context menu of the itemChange select action choose implementation to open the full context menu of the item… by @ksooo in #25596
• [Omega] Show “Maximum rewind time” on basic level by @garbear in #25585
• [Omega] Fix videos provided by plugins not played from info[windows] Fix videos provided by plugins not played from info … by @ksooo in #25611
• [backport] TestConversionMatrix: Add missing <iomanip> include by @neo1973 in #25627
• [cmake][addons] Dont quote variable passed to externalproject_add by @fuzzard in #25628

Kodi 21.0 Details

FFmpeg 6

Kodi relies significantly on FFmpeg to do a lot of heavy lifting for us. Many developers have contributed to upgrading the project to make use of the newer FFmpeg releases over the past 15 months, initially starting with targeting FFmpeg 5, but later updating to FFmpeg 6. We are always greatly appreciative of the work of all of the Open Source software projects that we rely on to bring you Kodi.

DolbyVision On-the-Fly Profile Conversion

For our Android users, a fantastic contribution from quietvoid allows users to convert some less well-supported DV profile types to more well-supported profiles.

macOS Now Uses “Native” Windowing

Another change that has been years in the making. This was started by some amazing developers many years ago, and we have now been able to finally remove the last remnants of SDL library usage in Kodi. We now use native implementations for window displays on the Apple macOS platform.

A New Platform: webOS

A new platform can now run Kodi natively: a port to LG webOS TVs has been worked out by some amazing developers who have reverse engineered huge amounts of the webOS media pipelines. One of our newest team members, sundermann, has helped shepherd our newest supported platform, to extend the reach of Kodi to even more devices.

In-game Player Viewer

Controller configuration for games gets a little better in v21: a window has been added in-game to view which game port each player’s controller is currently connected to.

Behind the Scenes

A large 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 Omega Alpha to RC2 release announcements and review the GitHub changelog here.

Time doesn’t stand still, and we have already branched Kodi v22 “P*” for development. 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. Your donations are greatly appreciated and help us to function, 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 21.0 “Omega” 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.

If you are an Android user and wish to update to Kodi 21.0 as soon as possible, you can either sideload, or join the Google Play – Kodi testing track which will get the release submitted more quickly. The “open” release will be promoted from the testing track in a week or two. We strongly advise Android users who use alternative skins to follow up with their skin developer, or to disable auto update before this time period, as not every skin will yet have been updated.

Kodi 21 Beta

On December 20, 2023, Kodi officially released the Beta 1 version of Kodi 21.  These changes are the foundation for the stable release that we have today. See below for the complete list of release notes pulled directly from the official press release.

Build/Dependencies

• A few dependencies have been bumped (openssl, python) as part of the normal update process.

Estuary, Estouchy

• @jjd-uk has made a fix for Shift view overlays (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24168).
• Media flags for music have been added to Estuary by @jjd-uk as well (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24162).

General

• A change was made by @CastagnaIT that narrows the scope of the optional track title providing language specific audio track data. Information regarding this advanced setting can be found on the wiki at https://kodi.wiki/view/Advancedsettings.xml#languagecodes.
• @rschupp has contributed to the removal of Kodi’s use of the library pcrecpp. The use of this was changed to use C++ standard library capabilities.
• A fix has been made for when some XML files written by Kodi would add a trailing null character, therefore making the XML invalid.
• Several users contributed to compiler warning fixes affecting multiple platforms. Thanks to @CrystalP, @fuzzard, @thexai.
• @Rechi has made further fixes to satisfy more static analysis based fixes/warnings.
• The FFmpeg library has been updated to 6.0.1 for all platforms that don’t use a system-provided FFmpeg version.
• @rmrector continues to improve artwork cache handling. PVR images are now handled like most other image types for the caching system.
• @ksooo has been fixing further context menu fallout as he endeavours to improve the maintainability and consistency across Kodi’s context menus.

Network

• A couple of fixes to IPv6 usage by @joseluismarti.

Platform Specifics

• Android:
  • More Dolby Vison updates have been submitted by @quietvoid. The latest fixes playback when some data is not provided by the FFmpeg library, and we would incorrectly categorise it as a different Dolby Vision profile (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24172).
• Linux:
  • @smp79 has submitted a fix to VDPAU HQ scalers.
• macOS:
  • @kambala-decapitator has updated our macOS signing tools to use Apple’s newer notarytool. The previous usage of altool was deprecated/shutdown by Apple in November.
• Windows:
  • The much-awaited HDR10 support was added for Xbox (@thexai https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24083).
  • The crash with VC-1 and some MPEG-2 videos when using DXVA decoding was corrected (@thexai https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24085).
  • A crash when closing Kodi on Xbox has been fixed by @thexai.

PVR

• @ksooo continues to fix/improve Kodi’s PVR system. Multiple fixes for different race conditions were merged for Beta2.
• Fix recordings with a path containing a ‘:’ not displayed in recordings window.

Python

• @the-black-eagle has added songVideoURL to the InfoTagMusic interface.

Skinning

• xbmc.gui version has been bumped to 5.17 (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23926).
• @DeltaMikeCharlie has added infolabels for locale based information (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24028).

UPnP

• @enen92 has continued making improvements in the long neglected UPnP feature of Kodi. The ability to serve smartlists via UPnP was added in https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24008, as well as a fix to the case where sometimes some UPnP usage to stop before it was started (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24201).

Videos

• @thexai has upgraded what was traditionally an advanced setting regarding Caching to a category in Settings > Services, containing the buffering fine-tuning settings. If you previously used these advanced settings, you will need to make the changes in the normal settings windows to make use of them now. The settings made in advancedsettings.xml are no longer handled (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24049, https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24117).
• More settings were added to control the NFS and SMB chunk size (@thexai https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24019).
• The setting Player > Videos > Use Display HDR capabilities was renamed to Adjust display HDR mode and moved next to Adjust refresh rate (@crystalp https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24100).
• After playing more than 5 seconds in a chapter, the Previous chapter action rewinds to the beginning of the chapter for a more intuitive behaviour (@crystalp https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/24066).

Known Issues

You can see open issues on our tracker at https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues. However, to call out a couple of specifics, please be aware of the following if you’re planning on upgrading:

• There are seek issues with multi-part MP4 files on Android (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/23673).
• We’ve had reports that the new splash screen looks like an OpenGL corruption; we know, it’s not a problem, so don’t panic. We’d be happy to have your artwork contributions if you’d like to work on an alternative.
• If remote sources are unavailable at startup, users are seeing large delays of startup (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/23958).

Kodi 21 Omega Beta 1

On October 24, 2023, Kodi officially released the Beta 1 version of Kodi 21. See below for the complete list of release notes pulled directly from the official press release.

Build/Dependencies

• A number of changes to the cmake build system have been made. These will be mostly invisible to users, but the intention is to modernise our cmake usage to prepare us for the future more easily.
• The cmake build system, when targeting Multi Config Generators (VS/Xcode), will now create a full complete build directory to allow a Kodi executable to be run immediately without the direct use of an IDE like VS. This is also the start to allow us to build dependencies for Windows for shared libraries, and be able to package them correctly.
• A number of fixes to allow building with GCC13 have been made. This mostly involved the transitive inclusion of headers in system headers being removed/changed. The fixes have been to explicitly include those headers in our code.

Estuary, Estouchy

• Retire Favourites dialog, use Favourites window instead (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23861).

Favourites

• Add selected items of the target to favourite’s context menu (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23895).
• Fix crash on moving items in favourites widget and favourites window (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23946).

General

• A bug was recently introduced that led to external subtitle entries becoming unavailable on streamdetails. This was fixed in https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23835.
• A fix to allow .strm files to properly use resume points was made by @Acidzero2020.
• An improvement to the Event Log “toast” notifications has been made by @DaVukovic to provide more meaningful information when an item fails to scrape TV Shows.

Input

• A fix to allow Python addons to correctly handle custom controller button inputs was made by @icr8ions. This allows addons like the Keymap Editor to correctly recognise and handle actions from custom controllers (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23789).

Music

• A PR that extends the Python ‘generic artist’ scraper to fetch the associated YouTube video links for an artist from theaudiodb, and then match them up to songs already scanned into the user’s music library. This allows skins to then display links to the corresponding song video. More information can be see in the PR from @the-black-eagle (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/22654).

Player

• Updated some internal constants to handle better very high bit rate streams (maximums of UHD Blu-Ray at least – 144 Mbit/s) (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23883).

Platform Specifics

• Android:
  • A fix to actually package themes for skins like Estuary/Estouchy was made. This was found by accident, and dates way back to the implementation of our Android platform (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23782).
  • @joseluismarti continues his improvement of our Android code. This time he has updated some code to use Android-provided values rather than a manually-curated list of values. (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23769).
  • A workaround for an Amlogic BSP audio bug that affects many platforms, even modern Google devices (more information here, fixed in https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/commit/be049ba900df39b9f2cef820a19088f8aa1ba7d2).
• FreeBSD
  • We don’t have too many improvements to our FreeBSD port, however @lrusak has brought FreeBSD in line with Linux with its usage of the command line argument --audio-backend (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23886).
• Linux:
  • A fix for a crash with Pipewire was contributed by @dobo90.
  • @lrusak has implemented a command line switch (--gl-interface=<interface>) to replace the old environment variable usage of KODI_GL_INTERFACE (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23907).
  • Kodi’s usage of the system ping utility has been replaced with an internal implementation (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23870).
  • DRMPrime has had a check based on pitch value removed as it was causing failures with some formats, like single plane and/or compressed ones, where the pitch can be 0 and therefore it has no meaning. Thanks @jernejsk (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23889).
• macOS:
  • SDL windowing while not enabled by default since Alpha1 (in favour of native windowing) was still a possible build compile switch. It has finally been removed in Beta 1 (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/22990).
  • Kodi now relies on an external library, smctemp, to display the CPU and GPU sensor values – this being valid for either x86 or Apple Silicon (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23770).
  • Network info subsystem was improved avoiding the execution of external commands to obtain the current gateway and DNS server list (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23724).
  • Improvements to input, e.g. the enter keyboard key was not being recognised (only key return) (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23860).
• webOS
  • @quietvoid has contributed a fix to allow webOS to play back AV1 DolbyVision files on supported devices (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23771).
  • Support to allow webOS to to suspend to background rather than exit was made by @sundermann (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23684).
  • With the support to suspend/minimise for webOS, behaviour to pause/resume media playback when Kodi is minimised/restored has been implemented by @sundermann.
  • Initial support for webOS 4 devices has been implemented by @mariotaku.
• Windows:
  • Fixed Windows 11 refresh rate switching (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23766).
  • Improved the vsync detection used by “Sync playback to display” mode (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23893). Breaks compatibility with Windows 7 (which is not supported in v21).

PVR

• Fix ‘switch to previous channel’ not working if it is in another group than the currently playing channel (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23932).
• Fix Live TV – Randomly spinner stays forever although channel is playing fine (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23844).

Skinning

• @DeltaMikeCharlie has provided a way for skinners to use a ParentalRatingCode info label (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23586).
• Infolabels for video width and height have been added by @graham8 (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23850).

Videos

• Respect default select action setting at more places – Home screen widgets, PVR recordings window, Favourites window (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23848 , https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23857).
• Add default play action setting to control resume behaviour when starting playback of videos (xhttps://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23863).
• Fix play/resume of BD and DVD disc images not working from Home screen widgets (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23905).
• Automatic video rotation from metadata was fixed (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23832).
• Teletext language codes sometimes were not persisted correctly in the teletext browser (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23890).
• Improvements to the teletext browser window (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23896).
• EDL files are now valid even if they are not on the same subnet of the Kodi host – valid across all private subnet ranges (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23836).
• @joseluismarti also contributed outside of his usual Android improvements with a fix for a crash when scan to library on a directory contained new movies (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23767).

Known Issues

You can see open issues on our tracker at https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues. However, to call out a couple of specifics, please be aware of the following if you’re planning on upgrading:

• There are seek issues with multi-part MP4 files on Android (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/23673).
• There is an upstream FFmpeg issue that means that OGG music playback does not work. This will be rectified upstream to Kodi. (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/23198).
• We’ve had reports that the new splash screen looks like an OpenGL corruption; we know, it’s not a problem, so don’t panic. We’d be happy to have your artwork contributions if you’d like to work on an alternative.

Listed below are the previous releases of Kodi 21 Omega.

Kodi 21 Omega Alpha 3

On September 10, 2023, the official Kodi website released Alpha 3 version of Kodi 21.

See the list of release notes below.

Estuary

• A change to Estuary to add “more…” to size-limited lists has been made by @ksooo. The effect of this can be seen in homescreen widgets that have more than 15 items.
• A number of changes to support video information for Movie Sets and TV Seasons has been made.

FFmpeg

• @popcornmix has made several fixes to our FFmpeg library usage. This has gone through several iterations now, and has affected seeking and playback to various degrees. Hopefully, the last of these regressions has now been squashed, but please do let us know if you experience any further regressions around playback using FFmpeg.

Filesystem

• @thexai has changed the chunk size of data requests for local media, increasing it 64kb to improve data throughput.

Games

• @garbear continues to improve the gaming interface of Kodi. Changes around player management/assignment have been made in https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23548. Have a read of that PR for more details/info.

General

• @ksooo has continued his whack-a-mole approach with issues regarding menu usage across the Kodi codebase. A fix for no information dialog for music videos, “Local art” missing for the art selection dialog, and further art dialog selection issues are amongst some of the latest fixes.
• TV Shows/Seasons/Movie sets/Recording folders now expose their ‘in progress’ state via LISTITEM_IS_RESUMABLE.
• The content of the refresh progress dialog has been improved a bit to be more informative for the user – for example, to display the current season and episode being refreshed.
• @repojohnray has had a (lingering) PR merged that fixes a memory leak in context menus.
• Some improvements and optimisations have been made by @neo1973 . This affects several areas (database and curl usage), and every performance fix is greatly appreciated.
• @rmrector has been digging into the image usage of Kodi (caching, allow remote viewing of images without having been displayed in Kodi, preloading of images and general streamlining of the API), and has made several improvements leading to more hotly-anticipated changes to come in the future.

Platform Specifics

• Android:
  • @quietvoid has had a PR merged that enables the ability to convert some Dolby Vision media types to more common types to allow playback. A forum thread has been around for testing that can explain the benefits a little better than this blog editor, so head there for some info and any feedback/support around the feature: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=371557.
  • @fritsch has once again delved into our Audio Engine to fix a regression for Amazon FireTV 4K users: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/23687.
  • @joseluismarti has further updated some Android dependencies and fixed/modernised areas of our Android API usage.
• Linux:
  • Support for cpu_thermal hwmon has been added. This enables devices like the Raspberry Pi to report CPU temperatures without the use of external scripts (as have been common in projects like LibreELEC).
  • @smp79 submitted a fix for VAAPI VP9 Profile 2 playback.
• macOS:
  • @kambala-decapitator has fixed a crash in the SDL versions of Kodi when pressing the Caps-Lock key. This did not affect the “native windowing” version of Kodi we have migrated to for v21 nightlies, however if you are building for x86_64 intel Macs then this should make using that key less troublesome.
  • @enen92 continues his work on improving Kodi for macOS. Network System info has been tackled to improve its speed, and more accurately represent network information like DNS servers used.
  • macOS temperature information is currently not supported on Apple Silicon devices due to our usage of a library that does not support them. @enen92 has made a change to report N/A instead of 0.0 for CPU/GPU temperatures.
  • Media keys are now supported on macOS.
  • Some improvements for moving the Kodi app window from high-DPI screens with differing refresh rates.
  • macOS releases are now defaulting to the “native windowing” system.
• webOS
  • @sundermann has continued with further improvements to the webOS port, most notably around passthrough and video decoding.
• Windows:
  • A PR intended to fix an issue around the Windows platform regularly losing track of the audio output device has been merged by @thexai. This hopefully makes Windows audio outputs more robust to situations where driver updates may change naming.
  • @CrystalP has been contributing a number of fixes/improvements particularly aimed at Windows. These include a fix for refresh rate switching for Intel and Nvidia graphics cards that was accidentally broken by a fix aimed at AMD cards.
  • More improvements to the recently add Video Super Resolution implementation have been made.

PVR

• A first time contributor @ivanllc has had a PR merged to add a “2 minute” option to the padding timer for PVR recordings.
• @ksooo continues to improve the Kodi PVR system. A number of changes were made, including fixes and tidy ups from static analysis tools (cppcheck and clang-tidy).
• Fixed a long-standing bug with subtitle selection not being preserved upon channel playback restart.

Python

• Changes made to support building Kodi when using Python 3.12.
• Python invoker now passes sys.argv arguments in a logical order to Python addons thanks to @scott967.

Skinning

• a change by @smfontes to allow loading of font sets defined in a skins/fonts folder: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/22993.

Subtitles

• Support for .ttc font collections has been added.

Video

• TV show groups (seasons, movie sets, PVR recording folders) with at least one started element (episodes, movies, recordings) but no completely watched ones are now considered as ‘in progress’ and they, for example, now appear in the respective “In progress” GUI elements like widgets and video windows.
• Fixed play counts (watched state) and last played date of episodes and movies not being preserved on internet update.
• Default select action for videos fixed.

VideoPlayer

• @alanswanson has provided a change to use the FFmpeg software deinterlacer from yadiff to bwdif. This is said to have fairly significant performance improvements over the old interlacing method.

There are a lot more changes not mentioned, but we are grateful for all contributors that help make Kodi better.

If you love to live on the bleeding edge of new, you can get Alpha 3 from here. Select your platform of choice, and look in the “Prerelease” section. Again, though, please: expect some breakage, don’t use this as your daily installation unless you know how to get things working again, and please share your experiences back with us so we can really get going on those bugs.

As usual – we are an open source project – you can see what’s changed between v21 and v20 here. For a more targeted look at the changes made since v21 Alpha 2, you can see those changes here.

Is Kodi 21 Omega available for download?

Yes. Users can install 21.3 which is the current stable version of Kodi 21 Omega.

Should I use Kodi 21 Omega?

Yes, we always recommend the stable version of Kodi for best functionality.

Can I install Kodi on Firestick?

Yes. Users can install Kodi on nearly any device they prefer including streaming devices such as the Amazon Firestick & Android TV/Google TV.