Kodi 22 "Piers": What's New, and Should You Upgrade?

Kodi 22, codenamed "Piers", reached Beta 1 on 29 June 2026, after an alpha cycle that landed hundreds of merged changes. The team has said focus has shifted from features to stability, which is the usual signal that a final release is a matter of months rather than quarters.

I build a different kind of player, so I have no dog in the Kodi fight — but Kodi is the most consequential open-source media centre there is, and this release contains one genuinely significant piece of engineering plus one change that will break things for people. Both are worth understanding before you tap update.

The Headline Changes

FFmpeg 8.1

Kodi's demuxing and decoding sit on FFmpeg, so the version it ships against sets the ceiling for what formats work at all. Moving to 8.1 brings in the accumulated format support, hardware acceleration paths and bug fixes of a substantial upstream jump.

In practice this is the invisible foundation for everything else. You do not notice FFmpeg working; you notice it when something that used to fail now plays.

Python 3.14 — and this is the one that will break things

Kodi's add-on ecosystem is written in Python, and Kodi 22 moves the embedded interpreter to Python 3.14.

Every major Python bump in Kodi's history has broken add-ons, and this will be no different. Add-ons that are actively maintained get updated and are fine. Add-ons that were abandoned two years ago stop working, permanently, and no amount of reinstalling fixes it.

If your Kodi setup depends on an add-on that has not seen a release in a while, check before you upgrade, not after. This is the single most common upgrade regret in Kodi's history and it is entirely avoidable.

The Linux rendering rewrite, and real HDR

This is the substantial engineering. Kodi 22 contains a significant rewrite of the Linux rendering path, delivering full end-to-end HDR support.

That phrase deserves unpacking, because HDR on Linux has been a genuinely difficult, long-standing problem. "End-to-end" means the pipeline carries HDR metadata correctly from the decoder, through composition, to the display — rather than tone-mapping to SDR somewhere in the middle and losing the point. Getting this right requires cooperation across the whole graphics stack, and it has taken years of upstream work in the Linux display ecosystem to become possible at all.

If you run Kodi on Linux with an HDR display, this is the reason to care about this release. If you run Kodi on Windows or Android, it changes little for you directly.

Live bitrate infolabels

Small, but genuinely useful: Kodi 22 can display live-updated bitrate information during playback.

For anyone diagnosing playback problems, this is a real diagnostic. Seeing the actual bitrate fluctuate tells you whether a stutter is the source running out of data or your device failing to decode fast enough — two problems with completely different fixes that look identical from the sofa. (Hardware vs software decoding, and how to tell them apart.)

Disc Manager

A new system for games that span multiple discs, letting them be played through seamlessly. Niche unless you use Kodi's retro-gaming side, in which case it removes a genuinely irritating manual step.

Should You Upgrade?

Upgrade now if

• You run Kodi on Linux with an HDR display. This is the release you have been waiting for.
• You are hitting format or codec issues that a newer FFmpeg plausibly fixes.
• You run few or no add-ons, so the Python change is a non-event.
• You enjoy beta software and have a backup.

Wait if

• You depend on add-ons. Wait for the stable release and for your add-ons to publish compatible versions. There is no upside to being early here.
• Your setup is the household TV and other people rely on it. Never beta-test the family's television.
• Everything currently works and you have no specific complaint. Kodi 21 is not going anywhere.

Before upgrading, whatever you decide

Back up your Kodi userdata directory. It holds your library database, settings, sources and add-on configuration. A Kodi profile rebuilt from scratch is hours of work; a restored backup is minutes. Kodi's own backup add-ons do this, or you can copy the folder.

Downgrading is possible but messy, because the library database schema moves forward with major versions and does not move back. Your backup is the actual escape hatch.

Kodi and Playlists: The Perennial Question

Since a lot of people find Kodi through playlist-based viewing, worth being straight about how that fits.

Kodi is a media centre — a framework with a library, a skinning system and an add-on architecture, designed to be assembled into whatever you want. Playlist and live-stream handling is one thing among many, provided through its PVR subsystem and third-party add-ons rather than being the core purpose.

That architecture is Kodi's great strength and its great cost. There is essentially nothing you cannot make it do. There is also essentially nothing it does without being configured first, and every major version bump means revisiting the parts that depend on add-ons.

A dedicated player is the opposite trade: far less flexible, and it works the moment you paste a URL. Neither is better in the abstract. They are different answers to "how much assembly do you want?" (If you are weighing the two, we wrote that comparison honestly.)

Plenty of people run both, and that is a perfectly sensible answer.

Where Tuneline Fits

For completeness, since the comparison comes up: Tuneline is a player, not a media centre. You add an M3U, Xtream or portal source and it builds a browsable library — no add-ons, no repositories, no skin configuration, nothing to break on a version bump. It supplies no content of its own.

It also runs on macOS, Windows, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android, Android TV, Google TV and Apple TV, with the same setup on each. It is free, with optional Pro (lifetime $34.99) for cloud sync and multi-device.

The relevant contrast with a Kodi upgrade: there is no add-on layer to go stale, so a version bump does not put your setup at risk.

The Bottom Line

• Kodi 22 "Piers" hit Beta 1 on 29 June 2026; a stable release is the next milestone.
• FFmpeg 8.1 raises the format ceiling. Python 3.14 will break unmaintained add-ons.
• The Linux rendering rewrite with end-to-end HDR is the headline achievement and the strongest reason to upgrade.
• Live bitrate infolabels are a genuinely useful diagnostic.
• Back up your userdata directory first. Downgrading is unpleasant; restoring is easy.
• Add-on-dependent setups should wait for stable.

Want something that has no add-on layer to break? Download Tuneline — paste your playlist and it works, free, on every platform you own.