The free and open-source media center application Kodi just received another update. Kodi 21.3 is rolling out with some great improvements for Xbox consoles and Linux systems, as well as a pile of bug fixes for other platforms.
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Kodi 22 ‘Piers’ already had its first alpha release in August, but Kodi 21 ‘Omega’ is still the stable branch, and Kodi 21.3 has a few changes to hold you over until version 22 arrives. The update was finished back in October, but the team “had some issues getting this version out to everyone,” so only now is it live for all platforms.
First, Kodi on Xbox now fully supports HDR playback on Xbox One consoles. It was already working on Xbox Series X and S consoles, starting with the initial release of Kodi 21, but the feature was still broken on older models. That has now been fixed, so all current Xbox models can now play HDR content if your TV or monitor supports it.
This release also fixes Blu-ray disc playback on Linux systems, which is especially great for Linux-based home theater PCs (HTPCs) equipped with disc drives. There have been a few reports in recent history of the feature being broken, including on a PC with Arch Linux and a Raspberry Pi running Debian, so give it a try again if you ran into problems.
Kodi 21.3 has a few more helpful improvements, like faster video library rescans, fixes for audio and subtitle issues when resuming Blu-ray disc playback, updated SSL certificates for network connections, and better support for HDR10 light metadata changes. The full changelog from Kodi is below.
- Added HDR support on Xbox One
- Fixed Blu-ray playback on Linux
- Fixed audio/subtitle issues when resuming Blu-rays
- Fixed handling of HDR10 light metadata changes
- Fixed subtitle selection for ISO 639-1 (two-letter) language codes
Library/Sources and Management
- Improved speed of video library rescans
- Fixed multi-episode files overwriting the first episode
- Fixed info dialog for certain Movie Versions
- Fixed some false positives detecting Movie Versions
- Fixed CDDB lookups using Gnudb.org’s CDDB API
- Fixed album search failing for artist names
- Fixed rare Pipewire crash when connecting/removing audio devices
- Fixed crash when a PVR stream is stopped via remote app
- Added support for Turkish keyboards on Linux
- Fixed enabling and disabling Pulse-Eight CEC adapters
- Fixed the Delete and Alternative Insert keys on macOS
- Fixed minor visual glitches when managing peripherals
- Fixed updating add-ons after 25 days of inactivity (extended to ~68 years)
- Fixed busy dialog crash when multiple dialogs are opened
- Fixed suspend dialog remaining open after the system wakes up
- Improved touch support for slider dialog arrows
- Added support for HTTP Basic Authentication
- Fixed some network streams failing due to interrupted HTTP/2 transfers
- Updated libnfs to v6 for embedded platforms
- Updated CA certificates to 2025-07-15 from the Mozilla CA certificate store
You can download Kodi from the links on the official website, and it’s also available from the package repositories in most Linux distributions. The update might take another week or two for a full rollout on the Google Play Store and Microsoft Store.
Source: Kodi Blog
