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 final version of Kodi 16.0 “Jarvis” has been finally released, along the Android version of the software. The new versions brings a huge list of changes and features, including:
- Start of integration of ADSP (Audio Digital Signal Processing) handling (no add-ons shipped yet)
- Improve image resizing and caching algorithm to improve image quality of images
- Added support for the musicbrainz “ARTISTS” tag in id3v2, ape, xiph.
- Add date added to music library and use it for sorting
- Support saving skin settings as add-on data instead of in guisettings.xml
- Image resource add-ons which provides common image libraries than can be used by several skins and add-ons.
- Don’t mess with the long and short date formats defined in the language files
- Add sort method for albums “artist / year”. This will sort the albums chronological per artist.
- Moved some add-on categories to “look and feel” in add-on manager
- Series recording added for PVR
- Add a “none” option for preferred subtitles
- Properly handle wired or bluetooth headsets on Android and only use PCM output
- Fix playback of VP9 and VC1 video codecs on Android
- Use best possible icons from other Android apps while browsing these in Kodi
- Enable true 1920×1080 output on AMLogic device without up-scaling
- Add Korean, Chinese and Czech keyboards
- Add multi-touch support for Linux platform
- Improve touch-screen keymapping
- The item that you had previously chosen will now be selected in the selection list instead of just starting at the top of the list
- Decouple Kodi and system volume on Android which removes the double audio volume slider
- Karaoke support has been completely removed as it wasn’t functional
- Various PVR fixes and improvements
- Various improvements to the music section
- The Kodi GUI now supports a new stereoscopic depth effect for users of Kodi on 3D TVs or VR headsets
- Add stereoscopic depth for Confluence skin
- Extended support for browsing movies by country and through UPnP as well as user-ratings which we be added in future version
For more information, study the release announcement for yourself.
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/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install kodi
Or, use the below command to install audio codecs and other addons as well:
$ sudo apt-get install --install-suggests kodi
Optional, to remove kodi, do:
$ sudo apt-get remove kodi*
The installation instructions should work on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus, Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Linux Mint 17.x, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya and other Ubuntu derivative systems.