Software Update: Kodi 16.0 RC 1

After five beta releases, the first release candidate of Kodi version 16.0 has been released as promised. This cross platform media center software is developed for Windows, OS X, Linux, Android and iOS. In version 16.0, among other things, the switch from DirectX 9 to 11 is made, support for 4:3 Non-linear Stretch has been added so that old TV series are also properly displayed and settings of the appearance of Kodi are now saved separately and no longer along with other system settings. In addition, functions can now be assigned to remotes when a button is long-pressed and improvements have been made to the add-on manager. The release notes for this release can be found below.

Kodi 16.0 “Jarvis” – Release Candidate 1

The time has come to bring you all Release Candidate 1 for Kodi v16. It took a bit longer than we anticipated due to some problems along the way though they should be under control now. This release consists of some nice features but more importantly the continues effort on making the underlying code more mature and future proof which should result in a more stable Kodi in general.

Some of you commented on several occasion that we should first fix the “known problems” in our previous versions before jumping to the next one. The fact is that fixing those problems correctly is such an undertaking that we simply can’t keep working on the previous one. Our team vision is to keep moving forward and along the way release version for users to use and enjoy that are considered stable enough. We don’t force people to upgrade so if you like an older Kodi version for some reason just keep using it. This vision is known as Release Early Release Often (RERO) on which we’ll make a more in depth review soon.

With that said lets focus on some things that have been changed and added which are noticeable for the end users.

What did change in Kodi 16:

• Implement the more future proof DirectX11 for Windows which still works for DirectX9 video cards;
• Event logging which among others shows which video files didn’t got added to your library;
• Skin settings are now stored as separate files like any other add-on which makes migrating settings a lot easier;
• Image resource add-ons which provide a single point of entry for skins to share common used images like movie studio icons and record labels which saves quite a lot of space and bandwidth;
• Audio DSP (Digital Signal Processing) add-on integration and are already included which could make things possible like equalizers, sound processing, fake surround and more
• PVR/DVR section has been extended and improved massively which now also handles series recording
• Music library improvements which includes asking to scan to library when adding locations and also better tag scanning
• Button long-press which extends the functionality of a single button to handle two functions which is great for button deprived remotes
• User interface now supports a new stereoscopic depth effect for 3D TVs or VR headsets
• Extend the UPnP server/client integration between Kodi installations
• Android now support a Surface Rendering which keeps the interface at normal HD resolution while allows playback of 4K on supported devices
• Removal of the infamous libstagefright on Android which served us for the past year while the Android platform matured to a fully fetaured MediaCodec
• Add-on manager underwent heavy changes which includes slightly different structure, per add-on auto-update on/off switch, better update/rollback support to choose from repos,
• Extend the included keyboard layouts which includes Korean and Chinese
• Improved multi-touch support which now also works on Linux
• Gives skin developers a more reliable platform to work from and reduce amount of work for adapting to new Kodi versions
• Greatly improved audio and video playback in general

With the list above we only highlighted some of the more noticeable features. The complete list is huge which could fill several pages. A lot of changes went in Kodi 16 like removing old code, splitting up parts in more logical chunks and making it all more resilient to future changes. All these changes are part of a massive change list that only makes sense to developers actually knowing what the source code does. In short we will not bother you with summing up that list. It’s just something that is worth mentioning that not all improvements have to be actual features and are visible to users. We prefer that the program actually works than adding new bells and whistles. Most of the times new features are just a side effect of cleaning up our code.