Kodi 16.0 "Jarvis" Released

[Arthur]

Website / Download

 

We are proud to announce the release of Kodi 16.0. Kodi 16 is a heavy under-the-hood improvements release, but let’s review some of the more prominent features coming out.

 

Event Logging

The first big step in making Kodi better at communicating with you, the user, is the addition of event logging. With this feature you always have a constantly updating list of all the most important things Kodi has done recently, along with little issues you can fix. For example, when you scan in a library for the first time, the Event Logger will provide you with a list of videos that didn’t quite make it into the library, each one of which is clickable, so you can go straight to the offending video and fix it personally.

 

You’ll also get a constant list of all recently updated add-ons, so if a recent update breaks, you’ll know the update happened and can then easily rollback.

 

Long Press

More and more hardware companies are coming out with remote controls with a very limited button set. In particular, all current Android TVs are lacking a dedicated context menu button altogether. To deal with this, we’ve taken a page from the touchscreen UX and added a long press feature to remote controls. Now, if you press and hold the OK/Enter button for a few seconds, you will pull up the context menu. In the future, long press may be extended for additional functionality. For a better view of what this means, see the following video.

 

 

4:3 Non-linear Stretch

It’s perhaps a bit late in coming, but Kodi finally supports stretching 4:3 content to 16:9 in a way that doesn’t warp the content that’s occurring in the center of the screen. Finally, you’ll be able to watch Friends, Seinfeld, Cheers, and Duck Tales in full screen without the awkward screen stretching from the past.

 

Add-on Manager Changes

In the ongoing quest to improve our our add-on manager several changes were done in the overall handling of each add-on. These changes include the following:

 

• The roll-back button on add-on info panel has been replaced by Update
  
• The Update button now opens a list of available versions of the add-on. Should you have several repositories installed that offer different version of this add-on you can now choose which to install.
  
• You can now disable auto-update per add-on through the info panel individual from others.
  

The add-on info panel can either be reached through the add-on manager or selecting the add-on in any section by either right click, use context menu (“C” key or long-press OK) and choose info or use the “I” key to directly open the panel.

 

 

Music Library Improvements

The music library has rarely received the same support as Kodi’s video library, and this release begins to change that. In the past, adding music to Kodi’s library required extra steps after simply pointing Kodi to the music folders. Now Kodi will attempt to automatically scan the music files into the Kodi music library. For music files to be scanned correctly, they will need to be properly tagged. To read more, visit the Kodi Beta3 blogpost.

 

Platform Specific Changes

 

DirectX 11 upgrade

DX11 Developer afedchin has gone through the long and arduous process of updating Kodi to DirectX 11, which brings with it support for modern tools and modern graphics cards, while maintaining backwards compatibility with old DirectX 9 cards. This major shift will help Kodi for Windows stay up to date for a long time to come.

 

Android Surface Rendering

Some newer devices that can do UHD or 4K playback lack the power to also create the Kodi interface at a 4K resolution, and this creates a problem. We have been forced either to downscale the video to a lower resolution to make sure the interface was snappy, or show full size video but the device might not be able handle the high resolution interface. We’ve now altered the way we display Kodi on Android. The video is always displayed on one Android surface while the UI is displayed on a second Android surface. This allows Kodi to display its skin at its native resolution (typically 720p), while simultaneously displaying 4K video on the same screen.

 

It is important to mention is that this doesn’t apply to AMLogic devices with proper permissions as these will still use amcodec. Any other Android device that is not able to do “android surface rendering” has not implemented the standard Android MediaCodec API in the proper way and will need to be upgraded on the Android-side to support the new feature.

 

Other Important Changes:

• Start of integration of ADSP (Audio Digital Signal Processing) handling (no add-ons shipped yet)
  
• Improve image resizing and caching algorithm to improve image quality of images
  
• Added support for the musicbrainz “ARTISTS” tag in id3v2, ape, xiph.
  
• Add date added to music library and use it for sorting
  
• Support saving skin settings as add-on data instead of in guisettings.xml
  
• Image resource add-ons which provides common image libraries than can be used by several skins and add-ons.
  
• Don’t mess with the long and short date formats defined in the language files
  
• Win32: Proper 24.0/60.0 Hz refresh rate in fake fullscreen mode
  
• Add sort method for albums “artist / year”. This will sort the albums chronological per artist.
  
• Moved some add-on categories to “look and feel” in add-on manager
  
• Series recording added for PVR
  
• Add a “none” option for preferred subtitles
  
• Properly handle wired or bluetooth headsets on Android and only use PCM output
  
• Fix playback of VP9 and VC1 video codecs on Android
  
• Use best possible icons from other Android apps while browsing these in Kodi
  
• Enable true 1920×1080 output on AMLogic device without up-scaling
  
• Add Korean, Chinese and Czech keyboards
  
• Add multi-touch support for Linux platform
  
• Improve touch-screen keymapping
  
• The item that you had previously chosen will now be selected in the selection list instead of just starting at the top of the list
  
• Decouple Kodi and system volume on Android which removes the double audio volume slider
  
• Karaoke support has been completely removed as it wasn’t functional
  
• Further improve DX11 implementation in Windows
  
• iOS 9 support
  
• Various PVR fixes and improvements
  
• Various improvements to the music section
  
• Three finger touchpad mapping in iOS to make room for new tablet gestures which will be available in Alpha 4 to complement existing tablet gestures.
  
• Kodi now supports being compiled with Xcode 7
  
• The Kodi GUI now supports a new stereoscopic depth effect for users of Kodi on 3D TVs or VR headsets
  
• Add stereoscopic depth for Confluence skin
  
• Extended support for browsing movies by country and through UPnP as well as user-ratings which we be added in future versions.
  

An enormous list of improvements

Besides the list above there has been a lot of work done in all areas in our source code. Removing old code, splitting up parts in more logical chunks and making it all more resilient to future changes. All these changes are part of a massive change list that only makes sense to developers actually knowing what the source code does. In short we will no bother you all with summing up the list. It’s just something that is worth mentioning that not all improvements have to be actual features and are visible to users. We prefer that the program actually works than adding bells and whistles.

[zag]

I helped write that announcement

 

Its a good release, a nicer stable core and some great improvements on android play store version.

 

Some of my highlights

 

- New onscreen keyboard

- Reading of the ARTISTS tag so picard tagged music works nicely now (think 50 cent feat. Eminem. Eminem will now show as a seperate artist cross referenced)

- Music Nodes (break up your music by customizing a smart playlist)

- Faster database queries

- Long press context menu on android

- Faster PVR channel switching

- Series recording finally!

- Nvidia shield now has interface at 1080p and video at 4k. This helps with interface speed alot.

 

Oh and if your desperatly hanging on for some kind of cool 3D effect, try out the stereoscopic view of confluence with 3d glasses. Very cool for a few minutes anyway

Edited February 22, 2016 by zag

[caffrey]

I'm currently using the v17 EGL builds, I got myself a N3150-ITX to replace my ageing hardware, new build is totally fanless

[zag]

If anyone's interested in the stuff coming in the next release v17 "krypton":

 

- Joystick controller management (in preparation for retro-player)

- Video player logic re-write

- DSP features (Think software AVR)

- HEVC-10 bit support

[jaminben]

- Series recording finally!

 

Does this work with OTA tuners (Freeview) and with all providers (I'm using MediaPortal)?

 

- Nvidia shield now has interface at 1080p and video at 4k. This helps with interface speed a lot.

 

Sweet

 

Are there any changes to the database (I'm using a central SQL database to keep everything in sync)... I only want to upgrade one of my machines at the moment.

 

Love my Kodi setup... have it on all my TV's

[zag]

Does this work with OTA tuners (Freeview) and with all providers (I'm using MediaPortal)?

Yes it works on all tuners. I've only tested DVB-S2 and TVHeadend myself.

 

Are there any changes to the database (I'm using a central SQL database to keep everything in sync)... I only want to upgrade one of my machines at the moment.

You normally need to run the same version on all clients with mysql as the database is upgraded on each release.

 

Personally I use the Trakt.tv addon to sync watched statuses around my different clients.

[jaminben]

Ok, I'll give it a go.

 

Thanks