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.
v17.4 [Jun 9, 2017]
Fixes done in this release:
Potentially fix crashing on Windows due to an issue in Python
Potentially fix crashing on Windows when enabling zeroconf
Fix sporadic crash on Windows when installing or updating add-ons
Fix issue for users with reverse proxies attempting to forward websockets.
Fix possible issue if Linux distro uses system ffmpeg and cause black screen with 10-bit H.265
Properly throttle scraping music information online to prevent overloading the provider
Fix native keyboard on iOS 11
Fix potential crash on Android O loading App icons
Fix non showing Kodi banner on Android O
Fix potential crash on Android with certain keymaps
Fix wrong detection of VP6 and VP8 videocodec on Android
Update FFmpeg to 3.1.9
Set hard requirement to use FFmpeg 3.1.x only
Fix for Hangup when viewing recording and pressing next/previous
Fix merged scraped album type and label correctly with that derived from tags from music files
Fix possible crash on Linux when using ALSA
Save skin settings immediatly after they have changed instead of only on shutdown
