Kodi

And, off we go again. The dust settles on the festive season, so it's time for another pre-release to hit the streets... we're getting close to final release now, so we're moving out of Beta and into RC. If you want to know the main features in this release series, please refer back to previous blog posts: this is an iteration of previous Beta releases, not a feature release, remember. This is stable, reliable code, suitable for daily use. Please, then: install, test, and give us clear feedback on any remaining issues, either with the new features or perhaps with a regression in existing code. As this is a release candidate, we think it's basically ready to go, but let'…

October... the month that gave birth to the world's most famous and traditional beer festival. What's possibly better than two weeks of collective beer drinking? Under normal circumstances...probably nothing. In the so called new normal? Let's pretend we can tolerate a bit more of this social awkwardness and find an alternative way: let's just celebrate beer... and open-source. Or in Team Kodi's dictionary: just another month at the office :) For yet another year, Kodi is participating as a project in Hacktoberfest. Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software run by DigitalOcean. During the month of October, individuals are invited to join open-sour…

... yes, it's here! After several iterations of alpha, beta and RC, Team Kodi is pleased to announce that Kodi 19.0 "Matrix" has just been formally released on all supported platforms. Dare you take the red pill, and find out how deep the rabbit-hole goes? By the numbers, then, this version is the product of: Nearly 50 individual open source developers contributed code About 5,000 commits in over 1,500 pull requests since the first release of 18.x "Leia" Over 5,500 changed files, with some 600,000 lines of code added, changed or removed Countless hours of dedicated free time conceiving, designing, developing and testing (including all the infrastructure you see around …

Is it too late to say "Happy New Year"? Probably, but this is still the first release of 2022, so let's go with that anyway. It's point release o'clock once more, so, without further fanfare, I give you Kodi "Matrix" 19.4: more bug fixes, some backports, no real new features. Full changelog since 19.3 on Github, as usual. Estuary Fix: Home screen context menu fix for when there are more than 10 items in menu. Fix: Seekbar wouldn't disappear after 5 sec when using remote app e.g. Kore or JSON to pause Kodi. Input Fix: English keyboard missing semi-colon. Fix: Chinese keyboard character now displaying correctly. Music Fix: Artist discography export to NFO. PVR …

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…

Team Flirc and Team Kodi are thrilled to introduce the newly designed Flirc Raspberry Pi 5 Case, Kodi Edition. Available now! Our journey began with a host of ideas that we transformed into a crowdsourcing poll on the Kodi forums. The community chose from six designs, and we loved seeing your preferences and hearing your feedback. We’re excited to continue this collaborative approach because, just as Kodi is community-driven, so should its official case be. With only about 2,000 cases available, this is a truly limited edition. Once sold out, we won’t produce more. Instead, every quarter, we’ll engage with the community again, allowing you to submit and vote on new idea…

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…

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…

Okay, a late announcement - apologies, you can blame the summer holiday season. Or, if it's easier, you can just blame me as the bloke with the keyboard, that works equally well. Either way, many of you will already have noticed this, but, in case you haven't ... Team Kodi is here with the first point release of the 21.x "Omega" series. A range of bugfixes have been collected since the original release of Omega 21.0. Rather than list them all here, you can see the full changelog on Github, as usual. We always want to thank everyone who has helped us track down and fix any issues. We endeavour to minimise the issues everyone experiences, but with such a large project, a…

This is a little later in the development cycle than would normally be the case, but I'm sure you'll understand why. It's traditional, as we move towards the release of a new version of Kodi, to begin the process of naming what will become its successor. In recent years, "Leia" gave way to "Matrix", which moved aside for "Nexus", and then on to our current version, "Omega". There's a clue there to the pattern, so P-something it is. Our normal process would be to ask the forums and team for suggestions, edit these down to a shortlist, and then run an internal poll and choose a winner. However, the shortlisting was done a little quickly this time, and we ended up picking …

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…