Kodi 17 “Krypton” Released, Kodi 18 “Leia” Development Started

Although not officially announced yet, Kodi developers have finally released Kodi 17 “Krypton” which you can download for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android, and iOS, as well as Raspberry Pi and some other development boards, and several Linux versions specific to TV box such as Nvidia Shield Android TV, Amazon Fire, or WeTek Hub. The most visible changes of the update are the new Estuary and Estouchy default skins, and people who have bought recent Amlogic based Android TV boxes may have already experienced them as several TV boxes shipped with Kodi 17 Beta versions.

There’s a long list of changes, but some noticeable ones include:

• Lots of changes and updated to the Live TV and PVR (Personal Video Recorder) include PVR backend clients addons
• New Settings user interface
• Media library improvements with multiple sources support, more filtering & rating options, and better scanning & database performance
• Audio Engine improvements on most platforms using ActiveAE
• New default web interface called Chorus2

There are also some Android specific changes, with the most important being that you now need Android 5.0 or greater to run the latest version of Kodi:

• Moved to Android API 21 and SDK 21 with NDK 10 as minimum, meaning at least Android 5.0 is now required
• Moved jni into its own separate project / submodule (jni backports from SPMC)
• Added support for audio pass-through for DTS-HD, DTS-X, Dolby TrueHD, and Dolby ATMOS
• Added support in CMake to debug binary-addon packaging issues on Android
• Improved MediaCodec API video decoding implementations support for Android 5.0 (API level 21) and later
• Improved automatic refresh rate switching support for video playback on Android 5.0 & later (>= API 21), inc. Android TV
• Improved support for UltraHD decoding / 4K resolution output when HW supports it
• Improved playback of HEVC, VC-1 / WMV 9, and VP9 hardware video decoding when using Android’s MediaCodec API
• Removed AMLCodec hardware accelerated video decoding support for Android on Amlogic device

Now that Kodi 17 has been released, no new features will be added, but bug fixing will still occur, and a dot release might be available later on. New features are now developed on Kodi 18 “Leia”.

Via Liliputing

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.

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