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.
v19.1 [May 9, 2021]
Video
- Fixed: HDR metadata is now detected in VP9 profile 2 streams and can be used on platforms that support HDR passthrough or tone mapped when playing this kind of videos.
Discs
- Fixed: playback of optical DVDs in Linux
- Fixed: BD-J Blu-ray chapter skipping via remotes/keyboard
PVR
- Fixed: context menu not accessible in PVR Guide window when using very basic remote to control Kodi
- Fixed: client channel name and number not persisted when changed
- Fixed: play count and resume position of recordings lost after Kodi restart
- Fixed: crash while browsing the EPG when MySQL is used as EPG database
- Fixed: next recording on ... label time is not localized in Estuary Timer/Timer rules window
- Fixed: channel manager does not rename backend channel
- Fixed: playing archived programme not selected when opening the Guide window
- Fixed: GUI not updated on removal/insert/hide/unhide of channel groups
- Updated: improved look of PVR windows in Estuary
Music Library
- Fixed: issue with music from cuesheets where only the first track was being added to the library on rescanning, with the rest being deleted
JSON-RPC
- Fixed: PVR - Reintroduced broadcast properties 'hastimer', 'hastimerrule', 'hasrecording', 'recording'
- Fixed: PVR - Reintroduced channel property 'isrecording'
Subtitles
- Fixed: detection of system fonts (directwrite) on windows for ASS subtitles
- Fixed: detection of user fonts (in userdata/fonts) for ASS subtitles
- Fixed: rendering of semi-transparent ASS subtitles on Wayland
GUI/Interface
- Fixed: media flagging for DVD/BluRay
Web Interface
- Updated: Chorus2 based on community contributions
Filesystem
- Updated: enable filecaching by default for network filesystems
- Updated: improve filecache error handling
Network
- Updated: improved reliability for HTTP and NFS network filesystems
Windows specifics
- Added: support for WS-Discovery protocol that enables locating SMB servers and browsing shared folders using SMBv3.
- Added: debug Info OSD Video. Extends current Debug Info Player (Ctrl Shift O) with new video-only info (Alt O)
- Fixed: with some unusual streams, incorrect HDR metadata could be passed (HDR10 passthrough).
- Fixed: green screen on systems with old HW (DX feature level 9.1) playing 10-bit videos.
- Fixed: black screen with Software render method and with DXVA2 hardware acceleration disabled.
- Fixed: green screen when playing the menu of some DVDs (MPEG2 SD only).
- Fixed: credentials being requested for anonymous SMB shares
- Updated: VC runtimes included in the installer to add compatibility with VS2019 and VS2017 at the same time.
Android specifics
- Fixed: SMB shares mounted on system level not visible in Kodi
- Fixed: SMB shares labelled with cryptic numbers (UUID) instead of actual disk name
Xbox specifics
- This version also brings 19.1 to the Xbox - while 19.0 has been in the Microsoft Store since launch, this was Windows-only while we found a way to adequately test the new release on Xbox. We've fixed that now, so Xbox users will automatically upgrade from 18.9 to 19.1 if you've got auto-update enabled. It's worth mentioning that there's a known memory limitation - present in 18.x as well - that causes Xbox application crashes with 4k content, so please be aware.
