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 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.
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My personal opinion… Kodi is getting worse and worse since Gotham release. They are pushing new releases too fast, not properly tested…. eg. I had Ubuntu 14.04 x64 running with kodi 14 running fine. Upgraded to Kodi 14.1 and I got regular audio out of sync (wtf??!!).
@Stane1983
I see the reason why they do this as fully reasonably, as they pushed out v14 Helix relatively because of the name change to Kodi, and now they are pushing out v15 Isengard fast because it is really only bug-fixes and smaller usability improvement with no major new features. And now v15 will almost only be a bug-fix release, or a so called “tock” release in a tick-tock release cycle.
In their defense they are lost several of their core developers like JMarshall, Davilla, Elupus, Spiff, and TheUni who have all retired or semi-retired from active development of the.
@Stane1983, I know you are a great embedded developer of XBMC/Kodi, so why do you not apply to join Team-Kodi/XBMC as a core developer? That way you can be part of the team that makes the decision and see exatly what goes on behind the curtains.
@Harley
I’m familiar with davilla and others left Kodi dev team.
With all respect to Kodi team, at the moment I don’t have time to work that much on Kodi. However, I will make pull requests with stuff that I think it’s needed (at the moment Amlogic platform only).
Kodi 15.0,is smooth,but tends to lack memory foundation ,but over,the next up & coming months like everything does,im sure it will be a winner.