Software Update: Kodi 18.0 RC1

The development of Kodi version 18.0 is still in full swing and has meanwhile arrived at the first release candidate. 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, with the aim of improving 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, which means that fewer stuttering should occur, and it can also handle 4k and 8k resolutions, HDR, DRM and the latest codecs.

Kodi v18 Leia RC1 – A new hope
After two years of hard work by all volunteers, either part of the team or of our great community we can finally say the last steps towards Kodi v18 are being being made. In past years many things have changed, either visually or code wise and to be honest i can’t even recall most. We as team would certainly like to thank every developer and user who spend time helping us get this far.

To this point the current v18 version has been proven to be quite solid to use as a daily driver for those who were brave enough to try it out. Of course you should still keep in mind it’s not a final release yet and that on any upgrade a small glitch could happen as we are still doing rework. Once you decide to give it a try it is highly recommended that you create a backup first.

currently included
To this point in time we’ve done:

• More than 9386 commits (code chunks changed)
• More than 3000 pull-requests (collection of commits that were included in one go)
• More than 8638 changed files
• More than 503,000 code lines removed
• More than 427,000 code lines added
• About 36 open source developers
• A lot of free time developing and testing these changes
• Quite likely several cases of beer or wine

A full changelog is nearly impossible to create looking back. As such this release article will only cover the biggest changes. For a more extensive list you can visit our wiki page v18 (Leia) changelog which will be updated along the way. From now on all v18 releases will not contain any big new features as we are focused on bug fixing or improvements only.

Make sure to also go through our news sections which contain all past announcements regarding the Leia release and some highlights of what it will contain.