

Kodi isn't dropping support for Windows 8.1 just yet, though. Microsoft ended all support and updates for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 earlier this year, and applications like Chrome and Edge moved on around the same time. There is one catch to Kodi 21: support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.0 have been removed, leaving Windows 8.1 as the minimum requirement. There's a new option to use the Windows HDR/SDR brightness balance setting for the interface and subtitles, read speeds on SMB connections are faster, graphics compatibility has been improved, and DXVA2 AV1 hardware video decoding 8-bit and 10-bit is now supported. Kodi 21 also has many improvements specifically for Windows PCs. Related: Kodi 20.1 Has Arrived: Here's What's New Kodi is working on better window handling for Mac, but most of that work isn't enabled yet - there is a fix for CD/DVD drive handling on macOS, though. A lot of this work will go unseen by users, however it's helping to make Kodi's huge amount of code more maintainable for the future."īut what about new features? So far, support for reading and writing M3U8 music playlists has been added, Dolby Vision detection and compatibility is improved, Pipewire audio under Linux now supports passthrough formats (like DTS-HD and TrueHD), and you can now sort channel groups in PVR. The blog post also highlights, "Modernization of several areas of Kodi have been undertaken by a number of developers.

Notably, Kodi now uses an upstream version of FFmpeg, which "allows easier FFmpeg updates in the future," and the build process for most platforms has been improved.
KODIFOR WINDOWS 8.1 UPDATE
Most of the work so far has been under-the-hood cleanup, like the 20.1 update that arrived in March. The Kodi team released an Alpha 1 build for Kodi 21 today, with a long list of changes and improvements.
