Kodi 18 "Leia" Released Ahead of FOSDEM 2019

As one should have expected based on the abstract of the upcoming Kodi presentation at FOSDEM 2019, Kodi 18 “Leia” has just been released a few days before the 2-day open source developer event.

It’s been nearly two years since the release of Kodi 17 “Krypton”, and it took a little longer than initially expected for Kodi 18 to become stable enough for an official since there have been so many changes including half a million lines of code added by 36 open source developers, close to 10,000 commits for almost 9,000 changed files.

Some of the improvements in Kodi 18 include:

Retroplayer gaming with support for gaming emulators, ROMs and game controls.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) decryption support to play subscription content
Improved Music Library with better filtering, faster API access, and more
Live TV improvements including support for new back-ends like Zattoo, Teleboy, and Sledovanitv.cz, as well as enhanced EPG and PVR support among other things.
Binary addon support and the binary addon repository. The binary repository is currently available for Android, OSX, and Windows; Linux users will still have to use the PPA, while iOS and UWP will continue to include the binary add-ons in the installer because of platform limitations.
Android Leanback and voice control with Kodi now being able to show its library contents on the main Android TV interface with full voice functionality.
Playback improvements (audio and video) for Blu-ray, 4K, 8K, and HDR content, as well as various audio improvements with ALSA, PulseAudio, OSS, Pi Audio, DirectSound, WASAPI, Darwin, SndIO audio systems now supported
“Estuary” skin modifications and changes to the GUI/skinning engine
Revised codebase and build guides – The build guides are kept up-to-date against the current code base
Platform Specifics changes:
- Android gets API bumps, speech-to-text, SD card support, etc…
- BSD gets all-around improved support, especially on the video (VAAPI/VDPAU) side
- Linux gets DRM, Mir/Wayland support, numerous video improvements, and build system changes
- iOS gets support for iOS 10, improved VDADecoder support, and general improvements on both TVOS and arm64 IOS
- Windows gets 64-bit binaries, along with improved UWP compilation, enhancements to image rendering, and various other platform-specific improvements

You’ll get the detailed list of modifications made to Kodi 18 in the changelog.

Kodi 18 Ubuntu — Screenshot of Kodi 18 in Ubuntu 18.04

You can download or/and install the latest version via the Download page. I could install Kodi 18 in Ubuntu 18.04 easily with a few commands in a terminal window:

sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install kodi

sudo apt install software-properties-common

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa

sudo apt update

sudo apt install kodi

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.