Kodi 20.0 (Nexus) has been officially released bringing major new features and improvements, smaller changes and fixes.
All known blockers have been cleared in the release, so that all supported platforms will be updated.
It should be noted that Microsoft Defender SmartScreen may display a warning screen when the Kodi installer is run. The installer is new and that is why the SmartScreen warning is displayed.
Kodi 20.0 Major Features
Multiple Instances of Binary Add-ons
This allows Kodi to load multiple instances of a binary add-on. For example: TVHeadend users can now run more than one instance of the add-on to connect to multiple back-end TVHeadend servers, with individual settings like channel groups and hidden channels maintained per add-on instance.
AV1 Video Support
Several Kodi platforms now allow hardware decoding of AV1 media. The Inputstream API has been updated to support AV1 and this allows add-ons using inputsream.adaptive to play AV1 streams.
Subtitles Rework
Massive rework of the subtitle system was undertaken making subtitle formats more consistent for development and maintenance, and enabling features that were previously not possible. Kodi now supports dynamic positioning of fonts, changing of border and background colours, subtitle positioning, improved multi-language support, and more.
Game (libretro) Savestate Support
The GSOC 2020 project of @NikosSiak received some polishing touches before finally (!) being merged. With mentoring from @VelocityRa and @gusandrianos, and the assistance of @garbear, this has been a long time coming.
This feature allows you to save game state at any time, even if games do not provide native savestate features themselves.
Windows HDR Support
Full HDR support for the Windows Desktop platform has been implemented along with many improvements throughout the Windows (DXVA/2) video pipeline.
HDR is not available on non-Desktop, i.e. UWP Store (Xbox) versions. Improvements to allow more accurate ACES Filmic and HABLE tonemapping make even SDR video look better, and these capabilities are implemented for both UWP and Desktop versions of Kodi.
NFSv4 Support
Changes to allow NFSv4 support were implemented by @lrusak as previously Kodi only supported NFSv3. There are some caveats with this (you must explicitly select either NFSv4 or NFSv3 for a source). Gi
Context Menu Consistency
Improvements to right-click/long-press context menu handling were made in numerous areas. This makes the function of the context menu much more consistent over different windows, and enabled some new capabilities like the playback of albums directly from widgets, series resume, etc. to be added.
The release features many under-the-hood changes that improve stability, performance and safety
Kodi 20.0 downloads are now available on the official project website. The multimedia application is available for the desktop operating systems Windows, Linux and Mac, for the mobile operating systems Android and iOS, and for Raspberry Pi devices.
Support for Android allows Kodi to be installed on many TV streaming devices, including Amazon Fire TV.
