[Diplomat]

OK, Fritsch, I get it. You don't want to be held responsible if someone loses their hearing from the noise due to audio stream corruption. But if you really wanted to remove all chances of that possibility, you would have to pull all the old releases from the web site and make every effort to have the old apks deleted from as many places as possible. But you're not gonna do that. The cat is already out of the bag.

So let's say Bob has a box that doesn't support native DTS passthrough and he really wants to get DTS output from Kodi. He learns that the latest version doesn't have that feature anymore, but the previous version does. So what is he gonna do? He's going to find and install an old Kodi apk instead of the latest one. So he will still be exposed to the noise problem. But on the other hand, he will have gone through a conscious effort to get the old apk. So if he or his kid damages his hearing, the blame would fall on him.

So how about this? Instead of removing the old behavior wholesale, you leave it in but with a condition. The passthrough settings are hidden by default. The user has to go and manually add a line to a configuration file to unlock and show them. And then when he goes to enable the settings, you might show a warning about the health/equipment hazard and so on. That way, he has to go through a significant effort and learn about the risk before he enables passthrough, which is at least as hard as looking for and installing an old version of Kodi. So the responsibility sort of shifts to him in this case as well.

I think this is a very good compromise. You can always claim that you were looking out for the wellbeing of your users, and so on. But then anybody who is determined can get the passthrough features without missing out on the latest Kodi release. As for me, I would have no problem compiling my own apk. I just thought this would be a better scheme for the most people.

(edited for clarity)