[ashlar]

Would there be any chance the main KODI team could be convinced to get involved ?

Forget about it. There's an incurable philosophical difference on this. DSPlayer mainly exists, by now, to allow people to use madVR. madVR is closed source and exclusive to Windows. As such, Kodi developers don't see the point in developing a version of Kodi that mainly exists to enable it.

Unfortunately aracnoz ended up being scared away from development when he realized he would have to keep on doing everything by himself.

Having said that, I've never managed to understand whether a binary plugin with madVR as renderer would be possible currently. At the end of the day, much as I love LAVFilters, their functionality is pretty much identical to what already Kodi does. But the video renderer in Kodi is far less sophisticated in its scaling algorithms than what madVR offers. And I don't see much development in that direction, making me think that for all intents and purposes it's deemed to be "good enough". The fact that more sophisticated algorithms mean more powerful GPUs and that for many Kodi has to run on sub $100 Android boxes doesn't help, I guess.