Kodi is an open source media player developed by the XBMC Foundation, formerly known as XBMC (the last version named after XBMC was 13.2 Gotham, 14.0 Helix was the first version named after Kodi), Kodi can run on a variety of operating systems and hardware platform. It allows users to play most videos, music, podcasts and various common digital media files from local or network storage devices.

The software was originally intended to run on the Xbox, hence the name. Then came native versions for Android, Linux, BSD, macOS, iOS, and Windows operating systems.

After a lapse of two months, the Kodi team has released another Alpha version of the upcoming Kodi 20 “Nexus” – Kodi “Nexus” Alpha 3. Here are the highlights of this update:

Add-ons

• Some crashes during add-on installation and repository checks have been corrected

• AlwinEsch has implemented a large feature that allows multiple instances of the same binary plugin.

  For example, this allows two instances of a PVR plugin to run with different backend instances, requiring updates to various binary plugins.

database

• Optimize various things in the database wrapper for better performance

DVD

• Fix DVD menu indicators for DRMPrime

File system

• Fixed NFS for Windows platforms after some recent NFS updates
• Some NFS improvements/cleanups
• Preliminary NFS4 implementation

font

• Some improvements to font/glyph handling code, especially helpful for low power machines, but helpful for all platforms.
• Improvements to Harbuzz glyph caching
• Fix some inconsistencies with RTL language

game

• Improvements/cleanups on controllers
• Fixed crash when controller info file didn’t have correct info

conventional

• Rechi has done a lot of work to implement improvements to static analysis tools like CPPCheck and ClangTidy
• Remove outdated add-ons from Core Kodi installation
• Fix player playlist type error for STRM files

enter

• Fixed an issue with dragging and dropping some controls with the mouse

specific platform

• Linux GBM
• macOS
  • Allow arm64 (Apple Silicon) builds to correctly find the appropriate binary add-ons from the software library
• Windows
  • Fixed incorrect window positioning when transitioning to full screen and back

Again, this is only an alpha release, please backup your configuration before testing.

For more details, please check: https://kodi.tv/article/kodi-nexus-alpha-3/