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Supported containers and codecs

Stefano Gottardo edited this page May 31, 2024 · 21 revisions

Media containers

  • MP4 *note 1
  • TS *note 2
  • ADTS
  • WEBM *note 3

note 1: For MP4 container, embedded audio tracks are not supported.
note 2: For TS container, only a single embedded audio track is supported.
note 3: Encrypted contents should not works, due to incomplete implementation.

Video codecs

  • AVC / H.264
  • HEVC / H.265 (NOTE: DRM content decoding supported only on Android devices)
  • VP9
  • AV1 (NOTE: Kodi v20 or above)

The hardware video decoding on DRM protected videos is available on Android devices with Widevine L1.

Dolby vision / HDR are supported but require suitable hardware.

Color depth

  • Until Kodi 20 non-Android systems, are limited to codec profiles with 8 bit color depth.
  • From Kodi 21 and above, are supported codec profiles until 12 bit color depth on all systems.

Audio codecs

  • MP4A
  • AAC
  • AC-3
  • E-AC3 (EC-3)
  • DCA (DTS)
  • OPUS
  • VORBIS

Subtitles codecs

  • TTML - Timed Text Markup Language *note 1
  • WebVTT - Web Video Text Tracks as text format type (https://www.w3.org/TR/webvtt1/) *note 2
  • WebVTT - Web Video Text Tracks as "MP4" (ISO/IEC 14496-30:2014) format type *note 2
  • DVB - Digital Video Broadcasting subtitle stream (MPEG-2 Transport Stream, TS-MPEG)

note 1: Support limited to text only, and does not guarantee correct display. Currently can be read XML TTML, ISO BMFF TTML is partially supported.
note 2: The full support has been added on Kodi 20. (Kodi versions prior to v20 still use a dummy parser limited to text only, and does not guarantee correct display of subtitles). For the ISO/IEC format exists different kind of features for which are not supported and display problems may occur.