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Arriva la nuova alfa di Kodi Omega: nuova libreria video e non solo

Vincenzo Ronca del 12 settembre 2023, 10:30

Quando si parla di piattaforme per la gestione dei contenuti multimediali anche in streaming, allora pensiamo subito a Kodi. Il tool è ormai in circolazione da diversi anni e il suo sviluppo continua senza sosta.

Se non sapete di cosa stiamo parlando, vi ricordiamo la nostra guida per scoprire come funziona Kodi. Per chi invece segue il suo sviluppo, arrivano delle novità nel contesto di Kodi Omega, la prossima versione di Kodi che è già in fase di test.

Nelle ultime ore infatti è stato rilasciato un nuovo aggiornamento per Kodi Omega in versione alfa. Si tratta della terza build di Kodi Omega, che poi corrisponde a Kodi 21. Sono diverse le novità introdotte, ma il team di sviluppo ci tiene a far sapere che si tratta sempre di una build alfa e che per questo potrebbe includere diversi bug.

Tra le novità introdotte troviamo la completa implementazione del supporto allo standard FFmpeg 6.0, miglioramenti per l'estensione dei widget, e in maniera simile è stato migliorato il supporto alla visualizzazione delle informazioni riguardanti i video in riproduzione.

Per quanto riguarda Kodi su Android, è stata migliorata la gestione dei contenuti con Dolby Vision, così come sono stati risolti diversi problemi che si verificavano su Amazon Fire TV 4K.

Anche per Kodi su macOS sono state introdotte diverse correzioni, come quelle dirette alla gestione delle risorse di rete, la gestione delle temperature della GPU e CPU e quella dei contenuti su schermi con alti dpi.

Insomma, la nuova alfa di Kodi Omega costituisce un consistente tassello per arrivare alla versione beta, sicuramente non ancora definitivo. Qui sotto trovate il changelog completo riferito a questo aggiornamento. A questo indirizzo potete scaricare la nuova Kodi Omega Alfa 3.

Changelog completo

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.