
Watch movies, listen to music, view photos and create a library with all your media files. Watch online TV content, listen to Internet radio stations or podcasts, check out the weather and bookmark your favorite items. The tool includes the ability to recognize seasons and episodes from TV shows and to add "watched" tags to the files it already played.
Conceived as an entertainment hub for a wide variety of media types and developed as an open-source project, Kodi is a universal media player with an extensive array of add-ons and other extras. Wrapped up in an attractive interface, it offers to organize your library and playback local and remote videos, audio files, images, TV, radio podcasts, etc.
Its attractive interface aims at becoming your one and only multimedia library, from where you can browse your holiday photos, listen to the radio, watch a movie, or playback your favorite music videos. Such an ambitious project requires equally ambitious management tools capable of keeping a wide variety of formats, sources, and file types neatly organized and easily at hand. In this area, Kodi still offers ample room for improvement. The main menu offers a mixed list of categories, in this order – Music (or any audio file, I presume), Music Videos, TV, Radio, Add-ons, Pictures, Videos (for movies and other non-music videos), Favourites, and Weather! It includes a useful search function, though, which will let you locate any item added to its library in a snap, and a button that will take you to the settings window.
Formerly known as XBMC, this multimedia player, and media aggregator covers most audio and video codecs and specifications, as well as a good variety of image file formats. This will allow you to playback media files in various qualities, including HD videos and lossless audio codecs. And this is actually what Kodi is about – playing back media files. It comes with all the features that you need to make that a pleasurable experience, such as playlists, artwork and tag support, access via remote control, slideshows, etc.
User-created add-ons are probably what make Kodi stand out from many similar tools. As an open-source development, it is easy for Kodi to benefit from the creativity of its many fans. In this section, you’ll find specific tools to play content from well-known Internet portals (such as YouTube or SoundCloud), access and record TV and radio channels, and many other media-related sites and utilities, such as scripts, lyrics, subtitles, etc.
Kodi aims at becoming the only media hub you’ll ever need to enjoy all your content, both locally and remotely. To achieve that goal, it’ll need to improve in certain areas, but that’s the beauty of open-source developments – they never stop improving.
v15.1 [Aug 8, 2015]
Fixes done in this 15.1 version
• Flush renderbuffers when flushing video player
• Fix broken network.bandwidth setting
• Fix stuttering in PVR windows
• Fix holding lock while querying PVR backend
• Unsigned apps are not working on jailbroken iOS 5.1 devices
• Add installed languages to the list of possible stream languages
• Ensure that file descriptor for logfile is NULL’ed
• Fixes a crash when trying do delete a file in filemanager
• Reimplement Cocoa_GetVolumeNameFromMountPoint for OSX
• Update label color for sliderex controls
• CProgressJob: fix crash in DoModal
• Fix missing return in CGUIWindowPVRBase::OnBack
• FFmpeg: Bump to 2.6.4
• Handle startup splash as regular window
• Fix linkage for VTB framework for iOS < 6 – fixes VTB on iOS
• Fix broken native keyboard on iOS 5.1.1 devices
• Fix wrong navigation in SmartPlaylistEditor.xml
• Make some virtual filesystems available when no network is available yet
• Fix formatting on mysql queries that could cause crash on update
• Only set mouse wheel control spin and slider controls when they are actually focusses
• Respect view mode changes of EPG when controlling number of EPG updates
• Handle startup splash as regular window which prevent problems if PVR or masterlock is used as startup window
• Fix watched flag not displaying if item is also resume-able
• Remove some logging on exiting that could crash on exit in some cases
• Fix overlapping subtitles in some cases