Kodi 15.0 Isengard Beta 2 Released

Kodi 15.0 Isengard has reached another milestone with the release of Beta 2. Team Kodi have detailed a number of key improvements in their blog post.

Database Clean-Up

Kodi 15.0 Isengard Beta 2 will do a one-time cleanup of the MySQL database. This is due to the build up of garbage data over time, such as duplicates caused by unexpected formatting of data from TheMovieDB and TheTVdb.

Refresh Rate Switching (Android)

One of the biggest drawbacks of Android as a HTPC platform has been its inability to match the refresh rate to a video’s framerate. For devices on Android 5.0 and above, there is a way of setting a “preferred” refresh-rate. However, support of this function depends on your device’s firmware. If you’re lucky enough to have a device that supports it, just enable it via Settings>Video>Playback>Adjust display refresh rate”. Please note, you may need to to change your settings level to see the option.

4K Playback (Android)

While many would argue there is a lack of 4K content, its presence is growing.  NVIDIA have helped Team Kodi to get both the UI and Video Playback to render at 4k@60Hz on supported devices.

Adaptive Seeking

Adaptive seeking, allowing increasingly large skip steps with repeated presses have now gained a configurable option in the GUI. Take a look at it in action below:

There are also some additional improvements in Kodi 15.0 Isengard Beta 2 since Beta 1.

From the blog post:

  • Bump libCEC to 3.3.0 which fixes a variety of problems
  • Reworked the storage provider on Android. This fixes several problems with mounting points for storage.
  • Fix the queuing of music videos
  • Improvement to FF/RW of videos
  • Improvement to picons in livetv
  • Prevention of clipping of rotated text, which happened in certain skins
  • Improved logic to make PVR, audio encoders and audio decoders optional.
  • Audio decoder and PVR add-ons are now disabled by default. When you want to use these you need to enable them manually.
  • Fix launching of add-ons from the add-on information dialog
  • Show progress for add-on repository update
  • Properly fall back to the new language files location
  • Fix of grouping movie sets when navigating in smartplaylists
  • Fix wrong icon showing in popup dialogs
  • Restore volume after pass-through on Android
  • Combine previously split GUI text into a single string. This improves ability to properly translate them.
  • Included newer version of several PVR add-ons
  • Fix incorrect fall-back language after we made them into add-ons
  • Fix 8channel audio conversion on Windows
  • Try to detect supported sample rates on Android
  • Do a complete video database clean-up session to remove leading/trailing spaces and invalid characters
  • Prevent inserting leading/trailing spaces and invalid characters on new video scans
  • Add season and episode labels to PVR section
  • Fix possible font corruption
  • Remove default 250ms audio delay on Android for AMLogic chipsets
  • Fix subtitles showing on top of each other in certain cases

Have you installed Kodi 15.0 Isengard Beta 2? Let us know about your experience in the comments below!

[via Kodi Blog]

Michael

Michael is a technology expert with over 15 years of experience in IT, Home Theatre and Automation. Feel free to send Michael a message here.

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3 thoughts on “Kodi 15.0 Isengard Beta 2 Released”

    • That’s the main thing. I’ll admit I always install betas as I always want to play with the latest features but there’s nothing worse when everything gets super unstable.

      Reply

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