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.
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:
|
1 2 3 4 |
sudo apt install software-properties-common sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa sudo apt update sudo apt install kodi |
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.
Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress
So it’s true…I read a short note on LibreElec.tv forums yesterday !
Now let’s see what features add-ons like Seren (or the dormant PseudoTV Live) and JeOSes like LibreElec, CoreElec and AlexElec add. I expect quick development.
CoreELEC is already available.
Yep, and also AlexElec Kodi 18.1 RC1.
LE- balbes150 already has kernel 4.xx working on 18RC4/5, so given the h264 ffmpeg improvements, we finally can see 4.xx working at least for HDMI – AV is still hit or miss.
Congratulations to all of the Kodi community for making this milestone. Well done!
I wonder what they are using for the main weather addon now that the venerable Yahoo Weather API has been turned off (RIP January 2019, same as the demise of Weather Underground which may have been the Yahoo feed).
I now use the GISxyx weather add-on- click on More Addons…
I basically got the update a day before reading this article on my Android TV box. I was on the beta before. I am a little glad I made the switch to 18 Beta by accident before.
Apps are appearing in Android that are eating into the Kodi market, by not being a all features product but a specialist in one sector.
The version 18 I’m running on Android TV is garbage. Need to downgrade till it can at least play videos w/o hanging.
Pause for 10 min, hung
Finish a single video, continuously play option set, if you’re lucky, stops. If not hung.
Sometimes power cycle from remote gets Kodi’s attention but a couple of times, had to pull the physical power.
17 works fine.
Using Mi Box.
I recommend going for beta in Play Store. I installed 18 RC1 yesterday and it seems to be a little better (compared to 18). I also had some issues, but they only appeared after updating to 18 RC2 or RC3. Kodi 18 RC1 was quite stable.