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.
v18.7 [May 20, 2020]
Audio.
- Fix to not reset user-set volume (Android).
- Fixes around multi-channel audio track support.
Playback/Display.
- Fixes to Bluray subtitle language recognition.
- Fix playback of bus-encrypted bluray discs.
- Improved library handing for plugins if media source is removed.
- Use JNI instead of NDK for MediaCodec (Android).
- Further work on maximum width and height/vertical-shift (Android).
- Fixes around realtime handling of TS streams.
Interface/Look-and-feel.
- Fix for watch icons not showing when content type is not set (Estouchy).
- Fix navigation in skinsettings (Estuary).
- Fix crash in favourites dialog.
- Apply safe area insets to Kodi GUI (iOS).
- Fixes around focus after touch action.
- Improvements around dialog/toast handling.
- Fixed behaviour when accessing locked media sources.
Music.
- Fixes around library handling of "isalbumartist" field.
- Fixes around expansion of .ISO images to avoid GUI freezes.
- Ensure album artist isn't blanked out when scraping.
Build System.
- Fix downloading dependencies from mirrors (Windows).
- Library updates - bump gnutls (3.6.11.1) and nettle(3.5.1).
PVR.
- Fix EPG corruption when new channels are added during startup.
Network.
- Improvements around handling of proxy credentials.
- Fix for proxy empty fields (proxy, username, password).
Addons.
- Fix crash if an incompatible VFS addon is present.
- Fix display of title for compressed package directories.
- Fixes around addon settings folder naming.
Subtitles.
- Fixes around decoding of HTML escape characters.
- Fix around SMI (SAMI) subtitles and quoted start tags.
Profiles.
- Fixes for issues related to switching profile.
- Fixes to saving of lock preferences (master lock, lock video windows, etc.).
Other/General.
- Add "Swiss German" and "Portuguese (Brazil)" to language codes.
- Fix to guard against assert in tinyxml.
- Fix stack overflow when trying to find NFO files in a RAR file.
- Implement range checking in URIUtils::resolvePath.
- Implement support for extended local headers in ZIP files used by some scrapers.
