Kodi

What's new in this version:

Live TV and PVR (Personal Video Recorder)
- Added enhancement/improvements to PVR addon API (connection state change handling, asynchronous updates & more)
- Added support for navigation controls between EDL (commercial skipping) during PVR recodings playback
- Added support for sorting channels by 'last played' in the Channels window
- Added support to changing of timer type for existing timers to ex. change a episode timer to a series timer
- Added support to echo up important Status info to Timer Rules in the Timer rules window
- Added option to hide disabled timers in the Timer window
- Added support for 'Edit timer' & 'Delete timer' rules to context menu in the EPG & Search windows
- Added support to allow timer creation for EPG in recent past in the EPG window
- Added support to use timer logos depending on its state in the EPG window
- Added "ShowTimerRule" builtin to allow key mapping for "add timer" dialog pre-filled for epg-based timer rule
- Added 'recent recordings' widget (core support and Estuary PVR home screen)
- Added vertical scrollbar to Guide window to allow channel navigation using the mouse (core support and Estuary change)
- Added support for JSON-RPC API sync PVR types fields with current implementation
- Improveed playback of live streams as PVR Live TV streams can now be identified as "live"
- Improved Kodi's Eventlog with extentions to PVR events for 'create/delete timers, timer rules', 'start/stop recordings'
- Improved PVR Guide window performance, especially on first open
- Changes to have separate windows for 'Timer Rules' from 'Timers'
- Changes to separate TV and Radio recordings in the Recordings window
- Changes to make 'group items' setting be persistent in the Recordings window
- Changes to recordings window which now respects "default select action" settings value
- Changes to instant recording behavior to make it configurable (fixed-time vs. current show vs. interactive)
- Refactoring of the PVR Manager (PVRManager) so addons are now owned by Kodi's addon system
- Added, updated, and improved PVR backend clients addons for all popular third-party external PVR backend platforms

Add-ons Framework, API, and Manager
- Added a new API level system to binary addons, refactoring the binary addon library interface for Kodi
- Added a new input system with an API for keyboard and game controllers as "Peripheral Addons"
- Added API support for "Peripheral Addons" for updatable configuration of input devices
- Added support for game controller peripheral addons to system addons
- Added a user-mappable Joystick (Peripheral) Addon for joysticks and gamepad abstraction APIs
- Added "Peripheral Addons" for game controllers, gamepads, joysticks, and input peripherals (in repo)
- Joystick Controller Addon
- X-Arcade (XGaming Tankstick) support for Kodi Addon
- Steam Controller (gamepad) Addon
- Default Game Controller Addon (reference game controller addon based on Xbox 360 gamepad)
- Added support for method to get our useragent string
- Added support for Addons to include screenshots to be visible in Kodi's Addons Manager
- Added support for skins to display 'recently installed' or 'recently updated' addon list in Addon Manager
- Added setting for enabling/disabling ZIP installation of addons from unknown sources (disbaled by default)
- Added a lot of Doxygen related Addons documentation regarding builtin commands to Documentation

GUI Engine (Skinning Engine)
- Added a new default skin called Estuary, with themes & colors, (moving Confluence to addon repo)
- Added a new default touch-screen enabled skin called Estouchy (moving Re-Touched to addon repo)
- Added a new Color Manager to handle loading of madVR 3D LUT ICC profiles for color correction
- Added a new FFmpeg based image loader to guilib for loading pictures
- Added a new FFmpeg based image thumbnails implementation
- Added experimental limited support to guilib for animated APNG images in skin textures and backgrounds/posters
- Added experimental limited support to guilib for animated GIF images in skin textures and backgrounds/posters
- Added support for commercial skipping notifications and toggle action
- Added support for defaultcontrol to grouplists to allow skins to define defaults
- Added support for 'InstallAddon' builtin to allow skins to install addons on demand
- Added Skin.SelectBool builtin support for skinning
- Added support for multi-touch to display adjustment for touch panel calibration
- Improved skinning PVR section by unifying and/or seperating different PVR related windows
- Update guilib ABI (for libgui) to version 5.11.0
- Updated keyboard layout for some languages and added new keyboard layout for French AZERTY & Italian QWERTY
- Changed context menus by refactoring to a global item based system to unify them
- Changed GetThumbSize() to m_imageResso so bookmark/chapter images are same resolution as posters
- Changed background loading of thumbnails so that it is enabled by default
- Changed default icons with updated versions

Platform Independent Playback
- Major refactoring of Kodi's built-in video player core (which also been renamed from "DVDPlayer" to "VideoPlayer")
- Added support for "InputStream" binary addon extension point that can serve as input stream for VideoPlayer
- Added support for "InputStream" (input stream) addons to system addons
- Added "InputStream" (input stream) client addons for common network streaming protocols and popular services
- Added support for 3D LUT (3D Lookup Table) & simple ICC profile linking support for color correction
- Added video stream selection to audio/subtitle dialogue to choose between multiple videos
- Added support for dithering for OpenGL rendering (part of VideoPlayer refactoring)
- Added support for gapless playback on stream change (with the new VideoPlayer)
- Added two new view modes that zoom depending on aspect ratio to match the screen heigh
- Added method for requesting desired video resolution to demuxer to new VideoPlayer
- Added multi-stream input demuxer to support a video stream with external audio tracks/streams
- Added support to change playback speed with audio enabled between 0.8 to 1.5 of normal speed with 'tempo' controls
- Added support for external PGS/.sup (Blu-ray Disc) subtitles
- Added support for hardware video acceleration of DVD-Video (with the new VideoPlayer)
- Added and improved several Audio DSP (Digital Signal Processing) plugins and ADSP addons for Kodi's AudioEngine
- Added and updated many audio decoder and encoder addons for Kodi
- Changed video renderers to separate graphics rendering from main thread (part of VideoPlayer refactoring)
- Improved A/V sync during video playback which reduce time required for audio sync (part of VideoPlayer refactoring)
- Improved switching refresh rates during video playback (part of VideoPlayer refactoring)
- Improved audio pass-through support during video playback (part of VideoPlayer refactoring)
- Improved MMAL playback of H.264 MVC (Blu-ray 3D) stereoscopic video with framepacking decoding on Raspberry Pi
- Improved Stereoscopic 3D playback of 3D videos (as well as better 2D playback of 3D videos)
- Improved and enhanced Blu-ray support (including updated libbluray dependecies from the VideoLAN project
- Upgraded FFmpeg multimedia codec and demux libraries to stable branch release version FFmpeg 3.1 (3.1.6)
- Removed certain audio codecs from core and made them into audio decoder and audio encoder add-ons

Library
- Added support for scraping, storing, and displaying multiple ratings from different sources
- Added support for user rating to the OSD (On Screen Display) for music playback
- Added support for rating and votes label for specific rating
- Added support to filtering by userrating in the mediafilter dialog
- Added support to include watched status for movies in actor search dialog
- Added artist roles tag to the music library to handle tags for ex. Composer, Conductor, DJMixer, etc.
- Added support for MOOD tag scanning for FLAC, Ogg, Xiph, Vorbis, ASF and MP4 audio files to music library
- Added option to exclude singles in recently played albums (set to enabled by default)
- Added support for showning "in progress tv shows" in the filesystem-tree
- Added support Audio and Subtitle Track Count to Smart Playlist selections filtering
- Added support to sort actors by number of movies they are in
- Added support to sort discography ascending by years
- Added support for a method to retrieve video tags
- Added ability to JSON-RPC API to return user ratings
- Improved performance for tag scanning and browsing speed in the Music library
- Improved database performance for addons accessing library

Web Scrapers
- Refactoring and updated scrapers in Kodi for music, movies, tv shows, and music videos
- Added possibility to get information from both .nfo and scraper

AudioEngine
- Added initial support for Audio DSP (Digital Signal Processing) plugins and addons for Kodi's AudioEngine
- Improved the default cross-platform event driven active state machine pattern ActiveAE (Kodi's AudioEngine)
- Improved ALSA sink for ActiveAE for Linux Desktop and generic Linux based Embedded Systems
- Improved PulseAudio sink for ActiveAE for Linux Desktop
- Improved OSS (Open Sound System) sink for ActiveAE for BSD, like FreeBSD and similar BSD Unix based systems
- Improved AudioTrack sink for ActiveAE for Android
- Improved Pi Audio sink for ActiveAE for Raspberry Pi
- Improved DirectSound sink for ActiveAE for Windows
- Improved WASAPI sink for ActiveAE for Windows
- Improved CoreAudio sink for ActiveAE for (Mac) OS X and iOS
- Improved Darwin sink for ActiveAE for (Mac) OS X and iOS

Other
- Added a new default web interface (this new ew webinterface is called "Chorus2" and is currently at version 2.4.1)
- Added support for AppVeyor CI (CI for Windows) build server for regression testing of Kodi and binary addons
- Added support building binary addons to Travis build server for regression testing of Kodi
- Added support for auto creating code documentation with Doxygen including To-Do list
- Added documentation for skinning API to Doxygen, and moved PyDocs of Kodi API to Doxygen
- Added support for IPv6 via cURL
- Added default for the WeTek Play USB remote to peripherals as input device
- Added support for game controller haptics (rumble motors) when the user receives a notification
- Added and updated many audio visualization and screensaver addons for Kodi
- Improved code stability, performance. and security, as well as general code clean-up in many core areas
- Improved render capture which is used by Ambilight implementations (such as example Boblight)
- Improved the the integrated UPnP / DNLA Media Server and Client
- Improved AirPlay compatibility support for iOS 8 (via updated libshairplay)
- Improved Kodi's JSON-RPC API
- Improved the the integrated web server (used for remote control web interface and more)
- Improved HDMI CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) support by updating to LibCEC 4.01 from Pulse-Eight
- Improved "long-press" support functionality of a single button on a remote control
- Updated community maintained translations to over 60+ languages to date for Kodi via Transifex Translation System
- Updated critical dependency libraries such as sqlite, openssl, gnutls, and CMake (used to compile binary addons)
- Updated artwork containing logos with symbol to reflect that Kodi is a registered trademark
- Removed support for RAW image decoding (with removal of CxImage as FFmpeg do not support RAW)
- Removed CxImage, Libgif, and JpegIO (C/C++ libraries) as dependencies in favor of FFmpeg image decoding
- Removed all Boost (C++ libraries) and libsquish as dependencies

Windows Specific
- Converted Kodi to an Desktop Bridge UWP (Universal Windows Platform) compatible app for Windows 10 (x86 only)
- Added initial support to compile Kodi for Microsoft's UWP (Universal Windows Platform) APIs
- Added new CMake based build system of Kodi and binary addons for Windows (as well as for Linux, BSD, and OSX)
- Added support for HEVC Main 10 profile (10-bit) hardware video decoding via DXVA on Windows if drivers support it
- Added support for 10 to 16 bit video output through the DXVA renderer
- Added support for per-monitor DPI and scaling
- Improved rendering system for DirectX 11 and Direct3D 11 native support on Microsoft Windows
- Improved DXVA/DXVA2 (DirectX Video Acceleration) support (requires DXVA/DXVA2 compatible hardware & drivers)
- Changed all external libraries to be built with Microsoft Visual Studio 2015
- Removed unneeded DXVA to D3D11VA wrapper as we now build FFmpeg with D3D11VA support and use it directly