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.
v19.3 [Oct 26, 2021]
- We've had some challenges getting the Xbox version released because of some specific platform requirements needed for 4k/HEVC playback. With the help of @CelesAtXbox (thanks so much!) we think we've now genuinely got those covered to Microsoft's satisfaction, and can finally get this into the Windows Store.
- There's also an issue with an expired certificate for 18.9 on Xbox, which effectively takes that version off that platform for new installations, so timing is opportune to fix that.
- There's been a long-standing Atmos audio issue on all platforms that support TrueHD passthrough - we know that this this has been irritating people for some time, and we've now been able to fix this.
- We unintentionally introduced a bug in 19.2 that broke Airplay, so we've fixed that one.
- A couple of gaming-related fixes, notably a controller fix and some shader issues on Retroplayer.
- We've fixed a bug that affected thumbnails for watched episodes when hiding episode spoilers.
- We've much improved the metadata shown in Linux app stores.
The Awakening Of A Silent Prayer
