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.

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