[fandangos]

Are you trying to update DSPlayer to v18? Do I get this right?  

It's what I'm trying, you're right.    

Whether or not you get it working, I would be curious in what the challenges are to update DSPlayer to v18. For example, how many merge conflicts have to be dealt with?  

I'm new into coding so don't take to heart my comment but I don't think the problems are conflicts, the problem is that you need to do part of the work all over again. 

You can take the entire dsplayer source, add it to a cmakelist.txt and it will compile but all the references to it must be made again, some have changed places or changed name. 
To be honest I don't see much of a reason why to do so, maybe you could elaborate on that. 

The only main advantage I see would be bringing dsplayer to a kodi version that fully supports bluray and uhd bluray menu navigation (as I've said in the past in this thread). Still having dsplayer running in kodi 18 or 19 wouldn't make this a reality because it would require some work in the code for a proper integration with libbluray. 

if you just want to playback movies with it you can add it as an external player and both will have the same profile directory, this makes the update pointless in my point of view. All other features related to Kodi being updated to deal with new websites data and scraping are not part of the player engine so I really don't see the reason. 

If this is because of the limitation where a kodi instance will not open while other is running, this is easily fixable just commenting a few lines of code and compiling it. 
If this is the case, let me know and I'll compile a nightly without this limitation.