Kodi v19.0 Matrix released and is available on all supported platforms with the exception of the Windows Store build for Xbox which is still in development but expected soon. For audio and music lovers, there are significant improvements across the board to metadata handling: library improvements, new tags, new displays, and improvements to how Kodi handles release dates, album durations, and multi-disc sets. There’s a new, Matrix-inspired visualisation, improvements to the display when fetching files from a web server, and several changes to how audio decoder addons can pass information through to the Kodi player.
For video playback, most of the changes are more technical, and may depend on your hardware: AV1 software decoding, HLG HDR and static HDR10 playback on Windows 10, static HDR10 and dynamic Dolby Vision HDR support on Android, and more OpenGL bicubic scalers.
For users who combine audio and video playback, and have libraries of music videos, database and metadata display improvements mean that Kodi will now fetch and display related album and artist information from the music library, where appropriate. There are also new features around grouping videos by artist (not just album), support for .NFO files that list all performers instead of just the main artist, plus better search links to return related albums and videos by the same director.
Kodi 19 is free and can be downloaded here.
