Kodi 22 “Piers” has officially entered beta, giving users and testers a preview of the upcoming major release of the popular open-source home theater software. So, now that the big feature work is settling down, the team is changing focus to stability, performance, and polishing before the final release. With that said, let’s look at what’s new.
One of the biggest highlights in Kodi 22 Beta is the upgrade to FFmpeg 8.1, which is always a key component for a media center application like Kodi. On the video side, the release also adds live bitrate infolabels, improves chapter handling, integrates bookmarks into forward and backward skipping, and fixes issues such as AV1 playback with keyframe filtering enabled.
Audio also gets fixes for a possible crash during DTS-HD playback and an audio delay issue affecting live TV when AC3/EAC3 passthrough is used.
Subtitle handling has been improved as well, including better visibility, timing fixes, improved handling of ASS/SSA script headers, and the ability to show the current subtitle codec for the video being played.
Apart from that, for media libraries, Kodi 22 Beta adds a new “Media Details” dialog, audio language information in media item badges, additional HDR formats in the user interface, better Blu-ray handling, improved stream details, and fixes for duplicate taglines and more complex episode ranges.
But Linux users probably get the most interesting part of this release. I’m saying this because Kodi 22 Beta brings a substantial rewrite of Linux rendering for embedded platforms using DRM, GBM, and GLES.
According to the changelog, GLES now reaches feature parity with GL. The release also adds full end-to-end HDR support, covering decoding, colorimetry, a tonemapped GUI, and 10-bit output.
There is also 12-bit decoding support, dithering and high-quality scalers for GLES, an “auto” dithering mode, YUV 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 support, and VAAPI hardware decoding for HEVC 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 on GLES.
This should be especially relevant for users running Kodi on ARM-based devices and embedded Linux setups, where hardware support has expanded, and video performance improved. On general Linux, Kodi 22 Beta also increases support for remote keys and fixes a possible crash when rapidly hotplugging Linux joysticks.
Elsewhere, the release fixes several remote database issues, including incompatibilities with MySQL 9.6 and newer, MariaDB 10.x remote databases, and a possible crash when the MySQL server is temporarily unavailable.
On Android, this beta fixes crashes related to voice recognition, Zeroconf browsing, and JNI exceptions, along with an error when running “Clean library” from the library settings. On webOS, Kodi 22 Beta fixes several playback-related issues, while tvOS users get improved Siri Remote playback controls.
For developers and add-on maintainers, Kodi 22 Beta upgrades Python to 3.14 and includes fixes for several Python stream-related methods. Inputstream add-ons also gain HDR, color metadata, 10-bit, and 12-bit support.
For additional details, see the announcement.
Kodi 22 “Piers” Beta is now available on the project’s download page, after selecting your preferred platform, under the “Prerelease” section.
Finally, Kodi’s developers warn this is still prerelease software, so users should expect rough edges, regressions, or features that may not work correctly. Kodi has not announced a final release date yet, but based on previous release cycles, the stable version is likely still a few months away.
