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.
v18.2 [Mar 7, 2019]
In keeping with the 18.x maintenance release cycle, this is a bug fix release, with no real new functionality. What's worth noting, however, is how we've identified and managed the bugs this time. We've always valued high-quality bug reports, and, for this reason, for 18.x we implemented an issue template and an automated verification system in the GitHub issue tracker. This makes the bug reports more complete, and gives the Kodi developers a better chance to pinpoint problems more accurately and fix them more quickly. The aim is to solve the problem of waiting for proper full debug logs, samples and suchlike, hopefully saving a lot of time and getting issues resolved more quickly. Hopefully, you can see the results of this new process in the 18.x bug fix releases.
For this 18.2 release we are also grateful to have received many code contributions from outside Team Kodi. With this help we were able to fix performance and dependency regressions in our GLES rendering path. Similar fixes were contributed for the AML platform, which really hasn't received much love over the past years.
VAAPI on Intel has gained some corrections for interlaced content that toggled interlaced flags during playback, and therefore caused stutter by reconfiguring the decoder.
Amongst other things, work has continued on Kodi's music experience: database access speed has been optimised as well as improved import functionality. Similarly, there have been fixes and improvements across all aspects of PVR, with a couple of particularly nasty bugs sent on their way.
You can also find a huge number of improvements for the Android platform. Because of the automated Google tests done in the Play store, we were able to track down and resolve a lot of issues revealed by those "drunken monkey" tests.
Beside all the fixes, we have introduced a Codec Factory (Android only) where power users can configure HW-Decoder usage in a fine-grained way. Most box sellers only provide usable codecs for formats which they use to sell content. Other format support tends to be poor, and therefore a configurable heuristic-based codec and video dimensions was added. The settings can be configured by the user in human-readable and writable XML format. More information can be found in the related pull request.
