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Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Kodi 22 “Piers” Alpha 3, released on April 1, 2026, added changes across playback, subtitles, library metadata, gaming, networking, and developer tools. It was an early prerelease—not a stable release—and later Piers builds have since appeared. Treat Alpha 3 as a snapshot of development, not as the latest version to install.
What changed in Kodi 22 Alpha 3?
Team Kodi’s Alpha 3 announcement highlights several user-facing features and component updates. Its detailed changelog adds fixes and improvements across Kodi’s media and platform support.
- TV-show taglines: Kodi added tagline support for TV shows and improved how movie and TV taglines are handled.
- Subtitles and languages: The build added H.264 AVCC subtitle support and full IANA language tags, while fixing WebVTT handling in ISOBMFF, subtitle selection for foreign audio involving PGS or VobSub, and crashes associated with some BCP47 tags.
- Remote control and integrations: JSON-RPC gained
Player.GetChaptersandPlayer.OnPropertyChanged. - Core components: Kodi updated FFmpeg to 8.0.1 and Python to 3.14.3. These are component versions included in the build, not measured speed or performance results.
- Database character handling: The MySQL/MariaDB charset changed to utf8mb4 with a general_ci case-insensitive collation.
Playback, audio, and disc improvements
The changelog includes work on Blu-ray menus and playback, Blu-ray episode handling, and movie chapters. It also notes improvements to seeking while playback is running at a changed tempo.
Audio changes include a default samplerate shift from 44.1 kHz to 48 kHz, fixes for missing audio at playback start and during playback-speed changes, corrected AC3 duration reporting for non-48 kHz content, and better low-latency audio handling. The announcement does not provide benchmark results or quantify performance gains.
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Games, network streams, and files
- Gaming: N64 support received software-rendering support and shader improvements, alongside game-related fixes.
- Network playback: The build fixed issues involving
tcp://streams, media information forstrm://content, and UPnP resume errors. - Folders and archives: Folder stacks and archive handling were improved, including support fixes for ZIP files larger than 4 GB.
- Profiles: The changelog also records profile-related fixes.
Platform and developer changes
Alpha 3 includes platform-specific changes for Android, webOS, Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. Developer-facing work includes removing unused code that had been triggering CVEs, a KodiAI app on GitHub, Visual Studio 2026 support, better C++23 compatibility, and Meson support for building dependencies.
Alpha 3 issues and release status
The Alpha 3 notes list two caveats for that snapshot:
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- MySQL 9.6 incompatibility: The announcement says Kodi was incompatible because “sets” became a reserved keyword, and that a fix was planned for a subsequent v22 prerelease.
- Blu-ray library details: Blu-ray stream details were not saved in the library.
These are issues reported for Alpha 3; the announcement does not establish whether they remain in later builds. Team Kodi announced Beta 1 on June 28, 2026, marking a shift from alpha toward stability and performance work. Its news index lists Beta 2 on September 5, 2026. Those later prereleases supersede Alpha 3 in the Piers testing cycle, but the cited announcements do not establish whether a stable Kodi 22 release is now available.
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