Kodi has released its latest update, and it brings you a lot of new features and fixes. I will explain all of these features and fixes in this article. This article will help you decide if this update is for you or not.
It has been a year since Kodi received an update. The last Kodi update was on February 20, 2021, and its name was Kodi Leia 18.9. The latest update came on March 04, 2022, named Kodi Matrix 19.4. So, take a look if this long wait for the update is worth it.
Kodi has been continuously improving to serve its users with a better experience and lesser bugs. Every new update of Kodi brings better features and updates with it. This newly added Kodi 19.4 matrix the update brought several fixes as well as some amusing features and functionalities, which are:
- It supports the tv operating system and iPhone operating system,
- It gives you specific TopShelf support added with fixes on AppleTV,
- Less buffering experience,
- Smoother browsing experience for movies, Tv shows, music, and other media.
Here is a list of new features and fixes.
1) New PVR and Live Television improvements:
Kodi has responded to the users who reported some issues while using PVR or at the time of watching live TV. Here is a list of some of the improvements and features:
- Reminders for PVR,
- Dynamic PVR categories
- New home screen widgets for TV and radio channel groups,
- Now, it provides support to start EPG entries as life,
- Navigation and dialog controls are now available,
- Finale, Live, and also Premiere available for Electronic Programming Guide,
- Recordings and timers,
- Guide window for navigation controls,
- Some considerable enhancements for Estuary skin’s PVR information dialog Setting,
- Channel type now allows you to view the content on the full screen,
- Sort method for recordings based on season and episode.
Major Fixes:
- Crash while navigating an empty guide.
- Hiding/deleting channel group now working correctly.
2) Improved Audio/Video Playback
- An improved audio playback now allows you to watch HD music videos while displaying the artist and album information,
- Now Kodi supports file tags over HTTP(S),
- Improved metadata such as new displays, better handling of album release dates and album durations,
- It now has an AV1 Software decoding.
- Now, Windows 10 has an HLG HDR and static HDR10 playback.
- Now, Android has static HDR10 and dynamic Dolby Vision HDR support,
- Kodi 19.4 also supports more OpenGL bicubic scalers.
Major Fixes:
- You can now export Artist discography to NFO,
- EDL mute is working,
- The ASS subtitles display is working correctly.
3) New and improved user interface
Kodi’s latest update brings you a better interface with a :
- Improved fullscreen music window,
- now playing view,
- newly Added metadata displays,
- new as well as updated GUI controls,
- artwork and image file improvement.
Major Fixes:
- Now you can hide any Favorites for a restricted/locked media source,
- No more “The wrong language identified from the subtitle name” error,
- Both Blu-ray ISO title and the watched status are now displayed correctly.
4) Some platform-specific changes:
- tvOS and added platform device support, which means you do not need an iOS 32-bit anymore,
- iOS – A better logging experience and notch support,
- Linux – Now you can also have a single Linux binary for windowing systems like X11, GBM, and Wayland,
- macOS – Mouse cursor positioning in full-screen.
The good thing with the previous Kodi 18.9 Leia is the compatibility with add-ons and builds. However, the Kodi 19.4 Matrix is Python 3. So, many older add-ons are not compatible with it because Python 3 has no backward compatibility.
This latest version is much more sensitive than 18.9 and other previous versions. So, if you want to access and use hundreds of third-party add-ons, I recommend you to stay with Kodi 18.9 rather than upgrading it with Kodi 19.4.