Software Update: Kodi 18.0 Alpha 1

The first official development version of Kodi version 18.0 has become available. This cross platform media center software is developed for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. In version 18.0, codenamed Leia, the entire source code has been reviewed, among other things, which leads to improved stability. Furthermore, several improvements have been made to the music library and watching live television, there is a full 64bit version from Kodi and is now also available through the Windows Store. Finally, the media player has been improved, so that fewer stuttering should occur and it can also handle 4k and 8k resolutions, HDR, DRM and the latest codecs. The complete changelog for this release is here to find, this is the first piece from the release notes:

Kodi v18 Leia – Alpha 1

A new hope dawns and it is finally time to start heading towards a final release. Today we are happy to announce that we are bringing you the first official pre-release Alpha build to a galaxy near you.

Around November 2017 the team decided that v17 Krypton was mature enough to start with the release steps and as such it was branched off from our main development tree. This basically means it received its own place in our development repository and would only receive bug fixes and small improvements. This is also the moment that frees up the possibility for several core developers to start another cleanup and improvement spree that was also done when just starting with v17. This usually details to take a more evasive steps on cleaning up code and less taking in account that certain parts will be broken for a certain time. Having a good foundation to build on is key in anything and that also includes a software application.

It’s hard to renovate a home while people are constantly using it and it’s easier to just move them to a neighboring home while parts are being torn down and being rebuild.
Maybe this is a simple analogy however it kinda fits. Another one is replacing the wheels and engine of a car while you’re doing 120km/h on the freeway. Better pull it aside and do it properly and give the driver a spare car that still works fine although it’s not so fancy driving yet.

In the past we mentioned doing RERO (Release Early Release Often) at times and to be honest we didn’t really got to that part so far. Only the bugfix versions of the final builds followed this to just make fixes available as soon as we saw fit. For a massive application like Kodi with many platforms and components a RERO approach is quite demanding on all people involved and perhaps it wouldn’t really make sense to do so in current state we are in. We do see this improving by the day so we are on the right track. At current time v17 is already a year old (with 17.6 bugfix past november) however it really just works fine across the board and should keep working for a long time. As we continued the work with current v18 Leia it kind of became apparent that the current workflow we are in works very very well. A healthy balance to the force (at least that’s what I personally feel) is currently active between cleanup, features and fixing regressions. A lot of Team Jedi and also regular users are running these nightlies builds and it’s getting rock solid to use. Of course you should still keep in mind that on any upgrade a small glitch could happen as we are still doing rework. Having a semi recent backup is certainly always a good idea.