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.
v18.6 [Mar 3, 2020]
Audio:
- Fixes around visualisations.
- Fixes around pause/resume.
- Fixes around TrueHD crashes.
- Workaround firmware bug (AMLogic v23) (sidenote: there are many more Android audio fixes that can't be merged into 18.x "Leia" because of old AMLogic workarounds)
Fix to correctly resume audio-only MPEG-TS streams.
- Correct headphone enumeration (Android).
Build System:
- Updates for missing includes.
- Updates for Cmake (Windows).
- Updates for device handling and packaging (macOS).
Games:
- Fixes for launching disc images and.zip files.
- Fixes for black screen for RGB emulators (Rpi).
Interface/Look-and-feel:
- Fixes around TextureCache.
- Fixes for windowing, refresh rate, mode change and others (Android).
- Fixes for floating/split keyboard (iOS).
- Fix for artist slideshow (Estuary).
- Fix media view from addon given content.
Playback/Display:
- Fixed race condition for OnPlaybackStarted.
- Fixes for MIME type (Android).
- Support for DolbyVision streams via addons.
- Fixes for maximum width and height/vertical-shift (Android).
- Fix for scanning in sub-directories.
- Fix size of EAGL layer on external screen (iOS).
- Fix for glTexImage3D (Linux).
- Fix for seeking issues.
- Reset playlist on new file playback.
PVR:
- Fix for multiline episode names.
Other/General:
- Fixed incorrectly formatted region time.
- Pass JSON serialised path settings to python scrapers.
- Fix file access on auto-mounted sources.
- Fix seeking with FileCache lockup.
- Fix passthrough on USB devices (Android).
- Fix crash if profile.xml gets broken.
- Fix cache forward size on EOF.
