As you may know, Kodi (previously named XBMC) is a famous open source media hub and home theater PC, being translated in more than 30 languages. Also, its features can be highly extended via third party plugins and extensions and has support for PVR (personal video recorder).
The latest version available is Kodi 15.0 Beta 2 “Isengard”, which brings the below changes:
- Bump libCEC to 3.3.0 which fixes a variety of problems
- Reworked the storage provider on Android. This fixes several problems with mounting points for storage.
- Fix the queuing of music videos
- Improvement to FF/RW of videos
- Improvement to picons in livetv
- Prevention of clipping of rotated text, which happened in certain skins
- Improved logic to make PVR, audio encoders and audio decoders optional.
- Audio decoder and PVR add-ons are now disabled by default. When you want to use these you need to enable them manually.
- Fix launching of add-ons from the add-on information dialog
- Show progress for add-on repository update
- Properly fall back to the new language files location
- Fix of grouping movie sets when navigating in smartplaylists
- Fix wrong icon showing in popup dialogs
- Restore volume after pass-through on Android
- Combine previously split GUI text into a single string. This improves ability to properly translate them.
- Included newer version of several PVR add-ons
- Fix incorrect fall-back language after we made them into add-ons
- Fix 8channel audio conversion on Windows
- Try to detect supported sample rates on Android
- Do a complete video database clean-up session to remove leading/trailing spaces and invalid characters
- Prevent inserting leading/trailing spaces and invalid characters on new video scans
- Add season and episode labels to PVR section
- Fix possible font corruption
- Remove default 250ms audio delay on Android for AMLogic chipsets
- Fix subtitles showing on top of each other in certain cases
Installation instructions:
The latest versions of Kodi available are available via PPA, so installing it on Ubuntu systems is a piece of cake. Just add the PPA to your system, update the local repository index and install the kodi package:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/xbmc-nightly
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install kodi
Also, to install the encode addon, do:
$ sudo apt-get install kodi-audioencoder-* kodi-pvr-*
Optional, to remove kodi, do:
$ sudo apt-get remove kodi*
The installation instructions should work on Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela, Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, Linux Mint 17 Qiana, Linux Mint 13 Maya, Pinguy OS 14.04, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya, Elementary OS 0.2 Luna, Peppermint 6, Peppermint 5, Deepin 2014, LXLE 14.04 and Linux Lite 2.