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 RC1 “Isengard”, which brings the below changes:
- Various improvements in PVR section. This includes skin support and new PVR add-ons
- Complete video database clean-up session on stored data (no data will be lost). This may take some time on first run
- ffmpeg 2.6.2 update which bring better codec compatibility and playback
- Improved CC (Closed Captions) support for Live TV
- Fix the queuing of music videos
- Improvement of FF/RW (fast-forward / rewinding) of videos
- Improved logic to make PVR, audio encoders and audio decoders optional
- Fix of grouping movie sets when navigating in smartplaylists
- External subtitles over UPnP can be enabled through the settings section
- Allow scanning of new sources and marking as watched during other library operations such as “update library”
- Allow different sort orders for different sort methods
- Skip steps (step forward & backwards) improvements for videos and music
- Add jump to first unwatched in TV section
- Fix subtitles showing on top of each other in certain cases
- Reworked add-on manager that should give a better overview
- Chapter selection window that shows thumbs on where to skip to in the video
- Easier to navigate audio and subtitle selection list
- Show progress for add-on repository update
- Addition of language add-ons which allow us to update the User-Interface text outside of regular Kodi releases
- Immediately fetch updates from repository after Kodi version upgrade to prevent delay in getting better compatible add-ons or skins
- Expansion of international options like time and date format, temperature and speed units.
- Improvement of installing new skins selection
- Upgrade included webserver which should fix issues with iOS or Android remotes loosing connections
- Fix season art scraping on newly added seasons
- On Android the system now handles the volume instead of Kodi
- Android HEVC H.265 support for some chipsets
- Refreshrate switching on Android 5.0 opr higher (your device must have the proper implementation of these features to support it)
- 4K@60Hz playback on the NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV
- Reworked the storage provider on Android. This fixes several problems with mounting points for storage.
- Remove default 250ms audio delay on Android for AMLogic chipsets. You may need to adjust the delay again
- Remove certain codecs from our core code and made add-ons out of them. So called Audio encoders/decoders
- Removed the need for root/SU on Android. Some hardware/firmware might not like that. Please contact your hardware supplier
- Removal of Tuxbox support. Users of Enigma2 boxes can use the VUPlus PVR add-on
- Removal of AFP filesystem support
- Remove legacy code pre-Frodo 11.0
- Vast amount of possible memory leaks, segfaults, crashes and minor issues have been fixed
- General improvements regarding code stability and performance in all areas
- General code clean-up in all areas to simplify adding future features
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.