Kodi 22 (codename Piers) has entered development for this powerful open-source, free, and cross-platform media center and entertainment hub software for all your digital media.
As you can expect, Kodi 22 will be a major release promising exciting new features for Linux users, including the long-anticipated HDR support on Wayland for compatible Wayland compositors, thanks to the addition of support for the Wayland Color Management protocol, and HDR passthrough support on OpenGL.
Kodi 22 also promises audio book chapter support, a completely redesigned Movie Versions/Extras section, a new Blu-ray episode selection menu, shader support for games, Python 3.13 support on Windows/Xbox, and initial Windows ARM64 desktop support.
For Android devices, Kodi 22 will support Android 15 and 16KB page size, along with support for file sharing on other apps and players and improvements to channels on the home page. For LG webOS, it implements a unified media pipeline.
Some networking improvements are also present in Kodi 22, including dramatically improved performance when listing large SMB directories, improved SMB GUI settings, support for SMB 2.0 devices that lack SMB 2.1 features, such as “large MTU”, and improved support for Windows SMB servers with no password.
For PVR (Personal Video Recorder), Kodi 22 promises a new Recently Added Channels section, along with a new widget, a new Providers window that requires skin support, a new Custom Timers section, as well as improvements to channel groups, saved searches, recording functionality, and EPG search.
There are also many other general improvements in the upcoming Kodi release, such as improved performance and memory usage on OpenGL and OpenGLES, improved large texture image quality with better performance on slow devices, improved stream selection, and improved mouse and keyboard support for games.
On top of that, Kodi 22 implements front-to-back rendering for better performance (OpenGL(ES) only), reduces memory usage for single- and dual-channel textures, implements automatic cleaning of cached images/artwork, and adds support for the FFmpeg 7 multimedia framework series.
Last but not least, Kodi 22 promises improved support for the OSMC Remote, Pulse-Eight CEC adapter, and Flirc receivers. Of course, there are also many bug fixes for a better and smoother experience, so check out the release notes of the first alpha version for more details.
You can download the Kodi 22 “Piers” alpha release right now from the official website if you want to take it for a test drive on your devices. However, please keep in mind that this is pre-release software that should not be used on or installed in production environments.
Image credits: The Kodi Foundation
