Kodi “Matrix” 19.5 Release, Last Before "Nexus" 20.0

I have been a daily user since XBMC was available for the original Xbox. It just keeps getting better. Big thanks to the Kodi team!

I used Kodi for many years (consistently since about 2008 and periodically before then) and stopped last year, largely because the no server, thick client architecture is less useful than it used to be. At this point almost everything I want to play video on has hardware accelerated H264 and H265 decoding, and so almost nothing I play involves transcoding. I ended up moving to Plex, not out of any particular love for Plex, just a basic idea that the value of having a server running exceeded the cost.

With Kodi I was relying on a bodge of extensions to sync watch status across clients, was maintaining libraries on clients separately (I know Kodi supports remote MySQL-managed libraries, but if I was going to run a MySQL server on my storage and run some kind of background process to handle library updating, why not run a server like Plex?)... stuff took forever to sync, performance for library management was not great. Even for browsing, I found Kodi not very performant for large libraries.

Switching away had some other benefits besides library management. Although Plex has more restrictive UI options, the default UI is much more wife/mom/friend approved. My wife had a stint in a hospital and we could watch films synced, together, using Plex (which also handled all the routing/port forwarding/whatever internally) The Sub-Zero plugin for Plex (now discontinued, but still operational) let me fill out subtitles for my content. Plex Media Manager let me integrate a bunch of external stuff into my library including syncing Letterboxd lists into my library. Mobile support is first class (including a somewhat janky download feature that's great for flying)

After switching away I kept an eye on Kodi, and the major thing I noticed is that development cadence is pretty slow at this point compared to Plex. Now, this is because Plex is VC backed and charges money for certain features, and dispositionally that annoys me a little bit. But it also does contribute to wider platform support and faster feature iteration.

A lot about Plex sucks. They piss away tons of time and effort onto VC-friendly features that have nothing to do with what Plex is. They're currently pursuing some nonsense where you use Plex to search for things available on Netflix and watch it there. They also launched their own free, ad supported streaming service which is annoyingly intrusive. They are stubborn about some design stuff that the entire userbase dislikes. They push incredibly awful changes and then act shocked when they get hundreds of comments from paying customers complaining about how bad the changes are -- recently it was a loud and annoying noise playing on startup. They reverted it after a day, but just generally I get the feeling Plex as a team either doesn't know what their audience wants or deliberately ignores it for VC reason. Obviously I'd be happier if it was free and open source.

Personally, I could easily see switching away from Plex to Jellyfin or Enby, but I can't imagine switching back to a serverless media setup.

I quite like Kodi and I really appreciate the work of the people that make it available for free. But it seems rather buggy.

I've had several versions of Kodi installed on 2 different media PCs. Each version was flakey in a different way. The current version (v18.0) won't let us see (or cancel) shows that we set up to record. So every time they re-run 'Impossible Engineering' (which is often) they all get recorded again. But I'm nervous about upgrading in case the more recent version is even more buggy!

I love Kodi, and still prefer it over JellyFin. But as others mention their grievances, mine are:

- on FireTV when I play video with 5.1 soundtrack, if the Fire goes to screensaver during pause, on a daily basis Kodi stops producing any sound upon resuming. Eventually it freezes. The only fix is force closing the player, which is not a trivial task on Android/Fire. Takes time to start it back up too. This does not happen to other players.

- for some reason after scanning every TV show episode appears in library twice. Not sure if it is fixable in any way but resetting player data all together, which means loosing settings, so I just endure that.

Used it while it was called XMBC then, it's one of those great and legendary open source software. these days movies are streamed over the network on-demand so the use case has shifted for Kodi I think. Still would like to try this again with my ever growing media libraries(family videos and pictures basically).

On a 6-year-old Android 6.0 box it is noticeably snappier than was 19.4, although on very new devices (Android >10) this is not noticeable to me. It was a drop-in replacement to the prior version with no reconfiguration required.

Is anybody else bothered that they can't put it in the Google store because they chose to support an older version of Android than what's allowed?