Kodi

Last year at FOSDEM, we were approached about our usage of analytics software on our websites that gives visitor data to big companies with servers located in countries with data protection laws that are less strict than what EU citizens are accustomed to. Team Kodi has always had a firm stance against user tracking in our software, so it felt inconsistent that we did not extend the same level of prudence to our websites. At first, we considered removing analytics altogether. But it quickly became clear that this would be problematic for our Wiki maintainers: Without any insight into what pages are viewed most, it is next to impossible to prioritize the pages to update a…

Hi, everyone - I'm Keith, and while I now find myself President of the Kodi Foundation, my initial involvement with Kodi goes way back, as a humble user. Since our 20th anniversary came and went, I've been meaning to write a bit of a look back on how we got here - how I got here. This is the story of my - and the project's - journey. In the Beginning... In 2002, a couple guys saw the potential of being able to watch media on their own terms, through what was a new type of device: a "connected" TV device. They wanted to bring many things you'd traditionally need a computer for to the living room, operating it from the couch without needing a keyboard or mouse, controllin…

Hey everybody, In June 2020 some suggestions on improvements to our add-on system were suggested by Matt Huisman and some minor changes were implemented. Who knew at the time but this turned into much more work both cleaning up the current add-on system and adding numerous new features. The main goal of this became to improve the add-on user experience and add security features in order to prevent add-ons and repositories from being misused by bad actors. The main problems were founded in the initial design of the add-on system, which doesn't distinguish between official and third-party repositories. This allows a mixup of installing and updating add-ons based only on t…

This is perhaps a little short notice, but Jason from Flirc - a long-time friend of Kodi - is hosting an ask-me-anything on Cordcutters on 9th November 2022. We just wanted to let you know, and give him the chance to say a few words about what's going on. I originally made Flirc, my first product, because I was frustrated that I couldn't use our same television remote control with Kodi. That worked really well for a long time, but, as the years passed, and our Kodi boxes evolved, I became increasingly irritated with the growing number of remote controls and the state of universal remotes. I thought I could do it better. My vision for our first remote always favored a K…

The moment is here to move to an even more optimal translation service for our application. Ultimately we have chosen Weblate, and its service will be hosted at https://kodi.weblate.cloud/. This is done to optimize our workflow and to allow easy inclusion of all add-ons in the official Kodi add-on repository. The transition has taken its time during at least the last year, so if you have made any requests at Transifex for new languages or team additions in that period, we're sorry we couldn't implement them. All current translations have been transferred to Weblate, and we would like to thank you for all your efforts in making Kodi the multi-lingual success it is. We h…

So, a slightly different topic for a change. We talk a lot about the Kodi software, its development and releases, and that's fine, as that's what we're all about and that's what everyone ultimately sees. However, we thought we'd change the subject a little and explore what goes on behind the scenes: how "Team Kodi" is structured, and what else is going on in the background in support of that glorious code. The Kodi Foundation and the Board of Directors Kodi has a legal personality. We're incorporated in the US as the Kodi Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit - or a type of NGO, in common European parlance. This is the "company", it's the entity that receives donations, s…

Recently, Team Kodi proudly released Kodi v21 "Omega", the latest major release of our popular media centre software. Our longevity and popularity means that Kodi is installed on literally millions of devices worldwide. For a range of reasons, not all of them are capable of supporting the newer releases; we do, however, try to maintain as much support as we can for the older releases, with our target being support for the previous two versions before the current one. The release of Omega thus moves Kodi Leia out of active support. The final version of Kodi Leia (v18.9) was released in October 2020. Leia was also noteworthy as being the final version which made use of th…

Many of you will probably be aware that, since the dawn of time, each version of Kodi takes a vaguely sci-fi/fantasy/movie-themed name, in alphabetical order (Ed: no, don't ask what happens after we get to Z). This has become common practice throughout the IT industry - look at iOS, Android, Ubuntu, Intel chips, and similar: it provides a useful and friendly way to refer to a release without getting tied up in numbers and decimal points. Anyway, over the past 13 years or so we've chewed through Atlantis, Babylon, Camelot, Dharma, Eden, Frodo, Gotham, Helix, Isengard, Jarvis, Krypton, Leia and Matrix ... and, as we branch the code for the next release, it's time to bestow…

Hello Kodi community. This is Scott, the founder of TheTVDB. There has been some confusion related to the availability of our API and the various Kodi scrapers for TheTVDB. Hopefully I can provide some clarity. TheTVDB was originally written in a weekend in 2004, with features and data slowly expanding with varying degrees of thoughtfulness. Inevitably, some mistakes were made and the industry has changed considerably in the years since. Through a complete restructuring of data a few years ago, we attempted to not only correct past mistakes, but also become more flexible in how we accommodate edge cases and non-traditional series. This rewrite forced us to create a new …

The Team Kodi PPA has long been a staple for Ubuntu (and similar) users wishing to use more recent, and less adulterated, versions of Kodi. It is with sadness that the team has come to a decision to officially retire the PPA due to the overhead of maintaining it. We want to express our sincere thanks to wsnipex for maintaining it for so many years, tirelessly making it available to countless users in the pursuit of making Kodi more easily accessible for the masses on many of the more popular Linux distributions. The Linux world is shifting slowly to packaged deployments and containers, and so, going forward, the team is looking to utilise Flatpak to hopefully give Linu…

After all, "that which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet" - okay, Shakespeare maybe had a point, but, for obvious reasons, he didn't know anything about software. For us, names matter because they usually herald a new release, a major change, and, yes, lots of lovely, cuddly new features. So, as is traditional as we move through our current release cycle - Kodi v20 "Nexus" recently entered beta - it's time to announce the name for what will become Kodi v21. As usual, we ran a forum post for suggestions, and we then worked through them to remove the obviously-profane, legislatively-dubious or downright impossible to type quickly, and then put it t…