Kodi, formerly XBMC media center, released version 20.3 this Wednesday!
According to the announcements, this is the last release of the 20.x “Nexus” series. While Kodi 21 “Omega” now is in Beta 2 stage.
The release mainly includes bug-fixes and some backports. They include an assortment of fixes for Estuary, including home categories’ focus position, alignment of counter labels and Shift view for collections.
For gaming, the release fixed controllers not assigned to game ports correctly on Android, blue/pink washed out colours on Windows with 10-bit displays, and possible crash in Port dialogue box.
For Linux, it includes fixes for VP9 Profile 2 playback failure, and a leak of EGLFences in the DRM Prime renderer.
Other changes in Kodi 20.3 include:
- Fixed playback from remote sources (ftp, http, etc.) through upnp.
- DVD playback fix that resolves unmounted drives not being playable.
- fix for infinite loops in CPluginFile that occurred when using scrapers.
- Fix memory leak in context menus
- Fix image cache handling and more.
How to Get Kodi in Ubuntu
Kodi provides binary packages for all supported platforms for downloading at the link below:
Ubuntu users can choose either Flatpak package or the official PPA. Checks the links below, both are not updated at the moment of writing.
Ubuntu PPA
The official PPA so far supports Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and Ubuntu 23.04. Ubuntu 23.10 should be also supported once the new package is uploaded.
To add the PPA, refresh cache and install kodi, run the commands (press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal) below one by one:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install kodi
Or replace the last command with sudo apt upgrade in case of missing package updates.
Flatpak package
Kodi is also available to install as Flatpak package. It runs in sandbox, however, support ARM64 (Apple Silicon, Raspberry Pi, etc.) devices.
Linux Mint 21 and higher, can directly search for and install Kodi as Flatpak package from Software Manager.
While, Ubuntu user can run the 2 commands below one by one in terminal to get the Flatpak package:
sudo apt install flatpak
flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/tv.kodi.Kodi.flatpakref
Uninstall Kodi
For Kodi installed from Ubuntu PPA, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal, and run command to remove it:
sudo apt remove --autoremove kodi kodi-bin
Also remove the PPA repository by running command:
sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
If you installed the Flatpak package, then uninstall it by command:
flatpak uninstall --delete-data tv.kodi.Kodi
Also run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove useless runtime libraries that can free up some disk spaces.
