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.
v17.6 [Oct 29, 2017]
- Added enhancement/improvements to PVR addon API (connection state change handling, asynchronous updates & more).
- Added support for navigation controls between EDL (commercial skipping) during PVR recodings playback.
- Added support for sorting channels by 'last played' in the Channels window.
- Added support to changing of timer type for existing timers to ex. change a episode timer to a series timer.
- Added support to echo up important Status info to Timer Rules in the Timer rules window.
- Added option to hide disabled timers in the Timer window.
- Added support for 'Edit timer' & 'Delete timer' rules to context menu in the EPG & Search windows.
- Added support to allow timer creation for EPG in recent past in the EPG window.
- Added support to use timer logos depending on its state in the EPG window.
- Added "ShowTimerRule" builtin to allow key mapping for "add timer" dialog pre-filled for epg-based timer rule.
- Added 'recent recordings' widget (core support and Estuary PVR home screen).
- Added vertical scrollbar to Guide window to allow channel navigation using the mouse (core support and Estuary change).
- Added support for JSON-RPC API sync PVR types fields with current implementation.
- Improveed playback of live streams as PVR Live TV streams can now be identified as "live".
- Improved Kodi's Eventlog with extentions to PVR events for 'create/delete timers, timer rules', 'start/stop recordings'.
- Improved PVR Guide window performance, especially on first open.
- Changes to have separate windows for 'Timer Rules' from 'Timers'.
- Changes to separate TV and Radio recordings in the Recordings window.
- Changes to make 'group items' setting be persistent in the Recordings window.
- Changes to recordings window which now respects "default select action" settings value.
- Changes to instant recording behavior to make it configurable (fixed-time vs. current show vs. interactive).
- Refactoring of the PVR Manager (PVRManager) so addons are now owned by Kodi's addon system.
- Added, updated, and improved PVR backend clients addons for all popular third-party external PVR backend platforms.
- Added a new API level system to binary addons, refactoring the binary addon library interface for Kodi.
- Added a new input system with an API for keyboard and game controllers as "Peripheral Addons".
- Added API support for "Peripheral Addons" for updatable configuration of input devices.
- Added support for game controller peripheral addons to system addons.
- Added a user-mappable Joystick (Peripheral) Addon for joysticks and gamepad abstraction APIs.
- Added "Peripheral Addons" for game controllers, gamepads, joysticks, and input peripherals.
- Added support for method to get our useragent string.
- Added support for Addons to include screenshots to be visible in Kodi's Addons Manager.
- Added support for skins to display 'recently installed' or 'recently updated' addon list in Addon Manager.
- Added setting for enabling/disabling ZIP installation of addons from unknown sources (disbaled by default).
- Added a lot of Doxygen related Addons documentation regarding builtin commands to Documentation.
- Added a new default skin called Estuary, with themes & colors, (moving Confluence to addon repo).
- Added a new default touch-screen enabled skin called Estouchy (moving Re-Touched to addon repo).
- Added a new Color Manager to handle loading of madVR 3D LUT ICC profiles for color correction.
- Added a new FFmpeg based image loader to guilib for loading pictures.
- Added a new FFmpeg based image thumbnails implementation.
- Added experimental limited support to guilib for animated APNG images in skin textures and backgrounds/posters.
- Added experimental limited support to guilib for animated GIF images in skin textures and backgrounds/posters.
- Added support for commercial skipping notifications and toggle action.
- Added support for defaultcontrol to grouplists to allow skins to define defaults.
- Added support for 'InstallAddon' builtin to allow skins to install addons on demand.
- Added Skin.SelectBool builtin support for skinning.
- Added support for multi-touch to display adjustment for touch panel calibration.
- Improved skinning PVR section by unifying and/or seperating different PVR related windows.
- Update guilib ABI (for libgui) to version 5.11.0.
- Updated keyboard layout for some languages and added new keyboard layout for French AZERTY & Italian QWERTY.
- Changed context menus by refactoring to a global item based system to unify them.
- Changed GetThumbSize() to m_imageResso so bookmark/chapter images are same resolution as posters.
- Changed background loading of thumbnails so that it is enabled by default.
- Changed default icons with updated versions.
- Major refactoring of Kodi's built-in video player core (which also been renamed from "DVDPlayer" to "VideoPlayer").
- Added support for "InputStream" binary addon extension point that can serve as input stream for VideoPlayer.
