Kodi 15 Alpha 1 Adds Support for H.265 on Android, Drops Some Older OS Versions and Hardware

Kodi 15 Isengard got its first public Alpha release, with 400 pull-request for code merges, 1322 commits and thousands of code lines changed compared to Kodi 14 release with modifications of all operating systems ports, and changes to newer OS versions.

Major changes for Kodi 15.0 Alpha 1 include:

Added adaptive seeking through audio and video playback, also know as “skip steps”
Android HEVC H.265 HW decode support for some chipsets
Improved webserver caching control
External subtitles over UPnP
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
Start of integration binary add-ons and changing the build system around it
Improved CC (Closed Captions) support for Live TV
ffmpeg 2.5.4 update
Remove remaining SDL code
New OS Requirements:
- Minimal Mac OSX 10.7 Lion requirements (Only OSX 64-bit builds provided, no more 32bit builds)
- Minimal iOS 5.1 required
- iOS 8.1 SDK & MacOSX 10.10 SDK
- Minimum Android 4.2 Jelly Bean MR1 required (OT: Not a good day for older Android versions, as the Chrome browser won’t be updated for Android ICS anymore). You’ll get the message “there was a problem parsing the package” if your version if not compatible.
- Android API 17 as minimum with SDK 14 and NDK 10e
ATV2 support dropped
Android TV platform should now be fully supported (side-loading still required)
Removed the need for root/SU on Android
Android PIL packaging fixed
Changed code to C++11
Variety of memleaks, segfaults, crashes and minors fixed
General improvements regarding code stability and performance in all areas
General code clean-up in all areas to simplify adding future features

You can download Kodi 15.0 Alpha 1 or nightly builds here, while Kodi 15.0 images for the Raspberry Pi board should be somewhere on Kodi.tv forums.

Thanks to Harley for the tip.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.