Kodi 20 "Nexus" Alpha 1 gets AV1 hardware decoding, DietPi 8.5 released

I’ll combine two unrelated short news about software releases for TV boxes, Raspberry Pi, and other SBCs: Kodi 20 “Nexus” Alpha 1 media center, and DietPi 8.5 lightweight Debian-based image for SBC’s.

Kodi 20 “Nexus” Alpha 1

The first alpha release of Kodi 20 “Nexus” is out with one highlight being support for AV1 hardware video decoding in Android and x86 (VAAPI) platforms with AV1-capable GPU or VPU.

Other notable changes include:

FFMPEG upgraded to version 4.4
Plenty of subtitle related changes:
Added Steam Deck built-in controller support
Initial support for M1 native including native windowing/input handling
Pipewire support in Linux
Various PVR improvements including in terms of performance when a large number of channels is displayed

You’ll find more details in the announcement. The RetroPlayer project based on Kodi, but adding some game-related features, has also released some test images based on Kodi 20. Note that since it’s an “Alpha” release, Kodi 20 can not be considered stable, and there should be a number of remaining bugs. The stable release should come in several months at which point it should be safe to upgrade.

DietPi 8.5

DietPi is a lightweight Debian-based Linux distribution for SBCs and server systems with the option to install desktop environments. It ships as a minimal image but allows the installation of complete and ready-to-use software stacks with a set of console-based shell dialogs and scripts.

The latest version, DietPi v8.5, was released on May 28th, 2022 with the following main changes.

Prowlarr indexer manager added as a new software option. It can integrate with various multimedia download apps such as Lidarr, Mylar3, Radarr, Readarr, and Sonarr, and supports the management of both Torrent Trackers and Usenet Indexers.
Amiberry (Amiga emulator for Raspberry Pi) updated to the latest version (5.x).
Security – WPA-PSK WiFi key input + storage as 64-digit hexadecimal key, as returned by wpa_passphrase, via dietpi-wifi.txt or dietpi-config.
Dropbear/OpenSSH – SSH public key support and password login control via dietpi.txt.

You can learn more in the announcement, and the source code is accessible on Github.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.