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Kodi 19.5 Released! How to Install in Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 | 22.10

Last updated: December 25, 2022

Happy Christmas and happy new year to my dear readers! Kodi, the popular home media center software, release 19.5 version to celebrate the holidays.

It’s the last point release for the 19.x release, while Kodi 20 now is in RC2 stage. And, this release mainly include bug-fixes and improvements backport from dev release. They are:

  • Update controller add-ons.
  • Fix wrong player playlist with playlist files.
  • Prevent crash on app quit in macOS.
  • Fix memory leak while zapping from channels to channels on live streams.
  • Expands the use of PasswordManager so that it is used for dav://, davs://, http://, https://, ftp://, and ftps:// protocol schemes.
  • Fix Ubuntu PPA packaging for Matrix.
  • Fix CC condition for valid captions [subtitles].
  • Fix refresh rate not switch back to 60Hz/GUI after HDR toggle in Windows.
  • Fix incorrect window position for Windows, which switching from full-screen.
  • Fixe some specific H265 Full HD videos crashes because needs more decoding surfaces.
  • Fix Xbox needs 10 bit swapchain to output true 4K resolution.
  • Fix bluray playback start from the simplified menu.
  • Fix adjust refresh rate start/stop settings behavior.
  • Fix subpar quality HQ convolution scalers.
  • Let the context menu action propagate through window.
  • Fix audio player to correctly start playback at given offset or percentage of track duration.
  • Fix incorrect colors in some AMD graphics when used 10bit in SDR
  • Fix last character corruption on AMD RX 6000 series.
  • Add support for ppc64le.
  • Fix EPG search genre matching.
  • Limit max width for long text cases.
  • Make sure we populate playerstate when it’s available from db.
  • Fix crash related to DXVA2 decoding of H264 SD interlaced videos
  • Fix window origin in multiscreen setup for macOS.
  • Fix crash when resuming from contextmenu and close contextmenu on playback started
  • Fix crash on open of Guide window.
  • Improves/fix 48000 Hz sample rate detection.
  • Fix colour management ICC profile/3DLUT parameters are not applied for Windows.
  • Fix GUI controls not loading if cloned after window load.
  • Remove unused function.

Install Kodi 19.5 in Ubuntu via PPA

If you found there’s important fixes for you, you can easily install or update to the new release by using its official PPA.

So far, the PPA contains the latest packages for Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 22.10 and Ubuntu 23.04. Though Ubuntu has include the new 20 RC release in the official repositories for 22.10+, the PPA should update your package into 19.5 due to higher packaging version.

1. First, open terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa

Type user password (no asterisk feedback) when it asks and hit Enter to continue.

2. Software Updater won’t upgrade the media center if an old version was installed in Ubuntu 22.04. Instead it show ‘Partial Updates’ issue.

As a workaround, either run apt install command below:

sudo apt install kodi kodi-bin

Or run sudo apt full-upgrade to install all available updates (you may still need to install kodi-bin manually). For Linux Mint, run sudo apt update before doing updates!

How to Uninstall:

For choice, you can either run command in terminal to purge the PPA, which will downgrade Kodi to stock version in system repository:

sudo apt install ppa-purge && ppa:team-xbmc/ppa

Or manually remove the software package via command:

sudo apt remove kodi kodi-bin --autoremove

And remove the PPA via command as you prefer:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
In Howtos
 

How to Install Bomi (CMPlayer) Multimedia Player in Ubuntu 14.04

Last updated: February 18, 2015

Bomi, formerly known as CMPlayer, is a graphical user interface (GUI) player based on mpv for Linux. It aims to be easy to use and also provides various powerful features and convenience functions.

By taking the advantage of mpv and GUI, bomi provides various features:

  • User-friendly interface: all features are available in context menu
  • Unlimited playback history
  • Automatic playlist generation and restoration
  • render styled subtitles such as SAMI and ASS format, bomi can render multiple subtitle files at the same time.
  • bomi supports hardware-accelerated decoding by GPU. bomi will utilize available native API for the system between VA-API and VDPAU.
  • dvd playback, image slide show, and other more basical player features.

Install Bomi player from PPA:

1. If you have CMPlayer installed on your system, you have to remove it first since it conflicts with bomi.

To do so, open terminal from the Dash or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run below command:

sudo apt-get remove cmplayer

2. Bomi has an official PPA that contains the latest packages for Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10 and Linux Mint 17.1.

To add the PPA, run below command in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:darklin20/bomi

3. Finally search for and install bomi via Synaptic Package Manager, or by running below commands one by one:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install bomi

For those who don’t want to add PPA, grab the .deb installer directly from the PPA packages page.

In Howtos , , ,
 

Install Multimedia Codecs, Enable DVD Playback in Ubuntu 14.10

Last updated: September 29, 2014

Due to legal constraints in many countries, Ubuntu does not include multimedia codecs to play mp3, movies, and DVDs out-of-the-box.

This quick tutorial will show you how to manually install the multimedia codecs to enable playback audio, video, DVDs in Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic.

Install Multimedia Codecs:

There is a package “Ubuntu restricted extras” available in Ubuntu Software Center. Installing it will pull in support for MP3 playback and decoding, support for various other audio & video formats such as mp4, avi, rmvb, wmv and more, Microsoft fonts, Flash plugin, LAME (to create compressed audio files), and DVD playback.

To install the package, just click the link below to bring up Ubuntu Software Center and click the install button:

During the installing process, you will be asked to accept the EULA license terms.

Tip: If you get a warning dialog says “to install ubuntu restricted extras, these items must be removed”, just click the ignore because -extra versions of these libraries will be installed instead, to provide additional functionality.

Enable DVD Playback:

After installed the package above, you should be able to play normal DVDs. But for playing encrypted DVDs, libdvdread4 and libdvdcss2 are also required.

Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, paste the commands below to install libdvdread4:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread4

The package provides a simple script to download & install libdvdcss2, to run the script:

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

If you can’t get the libdvdcss2 package from the script, download & install,

  • libdvdcss2_1.2.13-0_amd64.deb for 64-bit Ubuntu.

  • libdvdcss2_1.2.13-0_i386.deb for 32-bit ubuntu.

from the page: download.videolan.org/ubuntu/utopic

When done, you should be able to playback (and navigate DVD menus) in most video applications, including the default Totem and VLC media player..

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