Kodi 20 Nexus Officially Released – New Details & How to Install

By iptv.legal , in Kodi News , at January 16, 2023

This IPTV Wire news report covers the release of Kodi 20 Nexus.

Kodi 20 Nexus has been officially updated by the development team at Kodi and is now the stable version of this application. The last version of “Matrix” appears to be Kodi 19.5.

In this article, we will provide you with all of the important release details including how to install Kodi 20 Nexus on your favorite device.

Kodi is one of the most popular streaming apps and media centers used by millions from around the world.

This app is most commonly installed on the Amazon Firestick, Fire TV, Android, Windows, Linux, and even iOS.

The press release from Kodi’s website states the following on the official release of Kodi 20 Nexus:

“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.”

It’s important to mention that our reviews team has not tested Kodi 20 Nexus with all Kodi add-ons and builds.

We will be testing everything in the coming weeks and we suggest you bookmark our website for our results and suggestions.

Update: We can confirm that The Crew Addon does work with Kodi 20. This is the most popular Kodi add-on available.

If you are currently using any version of Kodi 19 Matrix and it’s working well for you, we suggest waiting for our test results before updating Kodi.

Kodi 20 does bring several new features to this popular software. The developers have done a fantastic job troubleshooting a large number of bugs in a short period of time.

Below you will find the release notes for the official release of Kodi 20 Nexus. These were directly pulled from the official Kodi website.

Kodi 20 Nexus – Features & Details

Stable Release

The “stable release” of Kodi 20 Nexus was posted on January 15, 2023.

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.

Your favorite 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 to make subtitle formats more consistent for development and maintenance, and enable features that were previously not possible.

Kodi now supports dynamic positioning of fonts, changing of border and background colors, 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 received some polishing touches before finally being merged.

This feature allows you to save the 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 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 tone mapping 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 was implemented 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 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!

Previous RC 2 Release

The “RC 2” release of Kodi 20 Nexus was posted on December 20, 2022.

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.
A second DB migration issue that only occurred on the Microsoft UWP platform (Xbox and UWP desktop) has been fixed. 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

A fix for playlist detection for both Audio and Video was made

Platform Specific

Linux
- We 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. 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

An issue around multiple resume dialogs has been fixed

Teletext

Another Teletext issue has been resolved. This will help increase the reliability and safety of Kodi.

Previous Alpha 2 Update

The “Alpha 2” update of Kodi 20 Nexus was released on July 10, 2022.

Android Platform

Fix a stutter when the Kodi Android app was opened, closed, and opened again. One of our team members noticed an issue with a recent PR that caused media stuttering to occur only after the app was opened and closed and reopened again without a force close. We have come up with a fix, so hopefully, playback should be a better experience over Alpha 1.
Another TrueHD fix – buffers reduced to a specific level to optimize data throughput
More local app icons should render fully in Kodi
Fix a packaging error for binary python modules (pycryptodome)

Xbox Platform

Fixes some specific H.265 video crashes

Python

Android and Apple systems have had their Python version bumped to 3.9.13 in accordance with the latest release of the CPython 3.9 series. Of note, there have been fixes by the CPython team specifically for issues raised by Kodi community members around some crashes. Thanks to those members raising the upstream issues, and the fantastic CPython team for fixing them.
Please note, that this does not affect any of our Windows releases, or if you are using Linux.

Filesystems

Fix a regression that caused thumbnails to not appear when accessed from “remote” filesystems (e.g. WebDAV)

Closed Captions

Fix an instance of Closed Captions not working. A forum member was able to provide an extremely helpful sample that allowed us to track down an issue with closed captions not working correctly. Incidentally, this also fixes Closed Captions for some Inputstream.Adaptive streams.

Subtitles

Multiple WebVTT fixes

Bluray

Fix BluRay resume issues

Thumbnail Images

Reduce “quality” of thumbnail creation
NOTE: An advanced setting is available for those users who wish to alter the default further. More information can be found on the wiki.

Skinning

A couple of skinning changes have been introduced
Skin timers
Removal of player.DisplayAfterSeek
Skip border infill
Moving speed
Diffuse fading animations
VideoPlayer.Art(type) and positional variants

Previous Alpha 1 Update

The “Alpha 1” update of Kodi 20 Nexus was released on May 16, 2022.

Video

AV1 hardware decoding for Android
AV1 hardware decoding for Linux via VAAPI
Bump to FFMPEG 4.4

Subtitles

Add new font style settings such as border size/color, background type/color/opacity, shadow color/opacity, and blur
Add support to display subtitles with dynamic positions which make use of position tags
Add underlined and strikethrough text style support
Add a new wide color palette in color settings
Add a new setting to change text alignment for closed caption subtitles for a better reading
Add a new setting to override subtitles metadata like style and position
Improved font size that now match the point/pixel proportion
When Kodi is in windowed mode subtitles are now always displayed correctly
Improved VPlayer for better reading of the multiline text
Improved SAMI format to better support multiple languages
Improved TX3G format to support multiple styles, colors and alpha channel
ASS/SSA subtitles are displayed without flickering
Improved image-based subtitle rendering to keep a better aspect ratio
Add support to the WebVTT subtitle format type
Improved font list setting – the actual names of the fonts are now listed
Add support to OpenType font type (OTF)
Improved calibration window, so it’s now possible to also reset the calibration settings
Subtitle settings can now be changed while in playback without side effects

Discs

Fix resume of Blu-Rays and DVD ISOs in file mode (not in library)
Fix playback of some optical discs on Linux due the incorrect mapping of mountpoints
On Linux optical media is now mounted by default (via udisks)
Partial code cleanup and platform split of disc drive handling
Skin cosmetics
Fix duplicated context menu items

EDL

Fix EDL mute sections and EDL cuts

GUI

Fix wrap lists
Fix hitrect on auto sized buttons
Fix some context menu options not triggering the respective builtin action
Independent volume setting for GUI sounds
Password reveal button in keyboard dialog

Input

Added Steam Deck built-in controller support

Skinning

Add a new Colour Picker window dialog to allow display a color list
Improved image control to support read dynamic $INFO data to “colordiffuse” tag
Improved Player Process Info window – new information has been added and grouped by context
New media flags for HDR videos: detect, store and process the type of HDR in a video file
Skinners can now define modal dialogs if its visibility depends on Boolean condition evaluation
Deprecation of old info labels with the introduction of new generic ones (e.g. Player.Editlist, Player.Cuts, etc)

Estuary/Estouchy

Estuary PVR Home Screen: New widget for timers (replacing old current/next recording widget)
Estuary PVR Home Screen: Add percentage played progress bars to Recent Channels and Recent Recordings widgets
Estuary PVR Home Screen: Change default click action to open the Guide window
Improve display of EDL markers on the default skin (EDL mutes are now shown, cut sections are also identified)

Games

Savestate manager for Retroplayer with captions describing the state of the game provided by https://retroachievements.org
In-game Port Setup dialog to change between game controllers

Platform Specifics

UNIX Family Platforms
- Implement WS-Discovery (SMB discovery) for *ix platforms (Android/Linux/Apple)
iOS/TVOS
- Improved Siri Remote handling
- Improved “Now Playing” info
macOS
- Initial support for M1 native including native windowing/input handling PR NOTE: We do not provide prebuilt M1 dmg’s. Any devs willing to work on ironing out the many corner cases of the native windowing implementation, don’t hesitate to ping @fuzzard on the forums if you have any questions.
- Extend GameController support to OSX
- Many code cleanups/refinements/refactors
Android
- Update Android build to use Gradle for signing/aligning/packing
Linux
- Add ACES/Hable Tonemapping for GLES
- More BiCubic Shaders for GLES
- Pipewire support
Windows
- New setting to use 10 bit swapchain for SDR videos. Improves video quality and more precise colour conversions: YUV to RGB, limited to full range, shaders, etc. This is true even if video output is limited to 8 bit RGB by system or graphics driver.
- Improved DXVA2 (HW video decoding) performance by sharing decoding and rendering surfaces. Avoids video copy operations and drastically reduces video memory usage on NVIDIA and AMD graphics using recent drivers.

i8n support

Harfbuzz rendering for scripts with open type font shaping features

PVR

Channels and Recordings can specify a provider
Read-only recordings supported
EPG Search: Add Saved Searches, incl. new Estuary PVR Home Screen widget
Channel Manager: Add possibility to refresh all channel logos
Settings: Add possibility to specify which data to delete when resetting PVR database
Automatic cleanup of cached PVR images (texture.db and cached image files)
Functional Improvements for multi PVR Add-on scenarios
Performance improvements, esp. for large number of channels

Build System/Dependencies

Most dependencies have been updated to latest, or close to, for Apple/Android platforms
Many cmake updates to update build system

Date/Time

Many many updates/changes to use std::chrono throughout the code base

Addons

Colour Picker
Colour button setting
Add support to add video HDR type info to a video list item
Function for removing orphaned dependencies recursively

How to Install Kodi 20 Nexus

There are a few ways to install Kodi 20 Nexus on your preferred Kodi device.

The best method for installing Kodi 20 Nexus is through the download page on the official Kodi website.

Those using the Amazon Firestick, Fire TV, or Android TV devices will likely have better luck installing the ARMV7A (32BIT) APK file.

We recommend not installing Kodi through the Google Play Store, as their download link is still pointing to 19.3 Matrix.

Overall, feel free to try the brand new Alpha release of Kodi 20 Nexus on your preferred streaming device!

But keep in mind this is not the official stable release of Kodi, as most 3rd party add-ons will not work properly.

For more information on Kodi 20 Nexus, refer to the video below.

For other popular Kodi resources, be sure to check out our most popular articles below.

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