14 DAY TRIAL // Kodi is a media player and entertainment hub that was called XBMC up until a few months ago. Now the developers have released a new branch of this application and they've made some serious improvements.
The community is finally getting used to Kodi as the replacement of XBMC, but it will take a while until this piece of news reaches everyone. XBMC has been around for many years and it has a lot of inertia. The developers are very much aware of this and they are continuing to improve upon the application. It's already much better than the last XBMC release, 13.x, and it's making great strides.
This is just the first Alpha release and that means there is still a long way to go until we see a stable version, but in the meantime anyone can enjoy the journey. It's already possible to install this new Alpha version and it doesn't seem to be very unstable.
Kodi 15.0 Alpha 1 is here
The new Kodi branch has been dubbed "Isengard" and they have the artwork to prove it. The developers have also pointed out that they are cleaning the code and that means a number of legacy-related features are going away.
"With this first public alpha release we will look back at the changes we have been doing for the past two months since the 14.0 release. We would certainly like to thank users who were already using our nightly builds to reach this stage. We've had about 400 pull-request for code merges, 1322 commits and thousands of code lines changed. Almost all sums up into the promised clean-up and stability," wrote the developers.
The devs have also added adaption skipping (moving fast forward or backward in small steps), Android HEVC H.265 support has been implemented for a few devices, the FFMpeg 2.5.4 update has been integrated, external subtitles are now supported over UPnP, and a number of memleaks, segfaults, crashes and minors fixed have been added.
You can download Kodi 15.0 Alpha 1 from Softpedia and give it a go. It's not a stable iteration, so please don't use it on a production machine.
