Kodi has officially launched Beta 1 Release of Kodi 21 Omega with new features and updates.
This version is considered a major release, as it is the first release moving from Alpha to Beta with numerous new features.
However, it is still not considered the stable release of Kodi which means there are likely regressions that still may occur.
For the time being, we strongly recommend using the stable version of Kodi which is currently Kodi 20.2 Nexus.
Listed below are the bug fixes and new features pulled directly from the official Kodi Website.
We also provide install links for those willing to test the unstable version of Kodi 21.
You can find the entire list of changes from Kodi 20 Nexus to Kodi 21 Omega on the official Github Page below.
Kodi Official Github

Kodi 21 Omega Beta 1 Release – Features, Fixes, and Updates

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

Favourites

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

Platform Specifics

Android:

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:

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:

PVR

Skinning

Videos

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

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.

Kodi 21 Omega Alpha 2

On June 18th, 2023, the official Kodi website released an “Alpha 2” version of Kodi 21.
See the list of release notes below.

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Build/Dependencies

Apple platforms are now all built using newer version of Xcode (14.2) and the relevant SDKs. Thanks to a combination of a new M1 Mac mini hardware donation from long time supporter of the project, MacMiniVault.com, and also the Kodi foundation purchasing a second M1 Mac mini, we have been able to decommission our ageing Intel Mac mini’s that have been in use for a long time.
Building on Windows now uses the system curl executable instead of our formerly bundled (ancient) wget executable.
Improvements to dependency building have been made by @lrusak to make the downloading/hash checking more robust.

Estuary

Improvements to the seek window timeouts have been made to more correctly disappear after appropriate timeouts.
Fix visibility of ‘next recording’ label in PVRTimers was made by @ksooo.

FFmpeg

One of our newer team members, @neo1973 , has made some cleanups and fixed some crashes in our ffmpeg side data usage, as well as other improvements with our ffmpeg API usage.

General

Improvements made to handling of movement keys (e.g. PageUp, Down, Home, End) in certain lists such as Settings.
@rmrector has been endeavouring to improve image cache handling for GUI items. We look forward to the further work he has in the pipeline to improve the cache handling.
Extraart configurations in advancedsettings.xml for Kodi 18 will no longer be migrated to the new GUI settings when upgrading. If you had meaningful configuration there, check that the artwork settings in the GUI match your preferences.
@CrystalP extended the navigation history to track the line number of the selected item so that it can be restored when the item disappears from the list, instead of resetting the selection to the top of the list (usually the ..) after the end of playback or changing the watched status of an item.
The generation of thumbnails was fixed for pictures in portrait orientation. The existing thumbnails in KODI_HOME/userdata/Thumbnails/* must be deleted in order to have new correct ones recreated.

JSON-RPC

Platform Specifics

Android:

@joseluismarti has continued with more cleanups and improvements to the Android codebase. Each improvement makes things easier to manage, and is greatly appreciated.
@fritsch has been able to make further improvements to AudioTrack to handle hardware that has sinks that get “stuck”. Its always a fine line making changes in the Android world, as the multitude of hardware vendors have widely varying implementation qualities of the standard Android APIs.

Linux:

@lrusak has added the ability for users to select the audio backend with a command line switch when starting Kodi. This also allows seeing with which enabled audio backends Kodi was built. For more information check out the following PR.

macOS:

The minimum OS required for Kodi on macOS is now Mojave (10.14). This was done to allow the project to continue using more modern C++ 17 features. macOS Mojave was released on 24th September 2018 and hardware supported can be seen at Apple.com.
@enen92 has continued to further improve what is known as “Native windowing” for our macOS codebase that will eventually lead to a formal Apple Silicon version. Improvements to window resizing, menu’s, window blanking, improved multiple monitor handling and more.
For developers, Kodi can also now more easily be run from Xcode without having to alter schemes.
@ksooo has now correctly added Speechrecognition entitlements for Apple platforms (including iOS/tvOS) which fixes a crash when microphone usage was triggered.
Support for HiDPI resolutions, such as those marketed as Retina displays, has been introduced in the native windowing version. This enhancement allows Kodi’s graphical user interface (GUI) to showcase higher pixel densities, resulting in a sleek and polished appearance on modern Macs.

webOS

@sundermann and @craigcarnell have made further improvements to the new webOS platform. Screensaver support has been added, along with audio sink improvements and updates to codec hardware support.

Windows:

Minimum Windows supported version has been raised to Windows 8.1.
@CrystalP and @thexai have made a number of improvements to windows HDR/SDR/HLG display including tonemapping and hardware DXVA support for a number of combinations of those media types.
@thexai implemented support for “Video Super Resolution” for Nvidia (RTX ) and Intel (ARC) compatible hardware. Please note, we obviously cant test all combinations of hardware, so don’t expect this to work for every combination under the sun. Give it a try and report any issues WITH debug logs.
Bump to libdav1d to version 1.20 should improve AV1 playback support for windows platforms.

Python

A fix for a regression was made by @lrusak that puts addon paths at the front of the system paths. This fixes addons using system modules instead of potentially customised Kodi modules of the same name. This mostly affects Linux based systems.

Kodi 21 Omega Download

We recommend continuing to use the stable version of Kodi until Kodi 21 Omega stable is released.
However, you can test the app on your preferred device by installing with the links below.
Kodi 21 Omega – Windows
Kodi 21 Omega – Android
Install Guide for Kodi 21 Omega – Linux

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Kodi 21 Omega?

Kodi 21 Omega is the pre-release of the latest Kodi software.

Is Kodi 21 Omega available for download?

Yes. Users can install a pre-release version of Kodi 21 Omega.

Should I use Kodi 21 Omega?

We suggest avoiding Kodi 21 Omega until it is in the stable release.

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.

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