The Add-on Manager saw a great number of improvements

Apr 2, 2015 03:10 GMT  ·  By

The Kodi development team has announced today, April 2, that the second Alpha release of the forthcoming Kodi 15.0 “Isengard” media center (formerly XBMC Media Center) is now available for download and testing. This a great milestone in the development cycle of Kodi 15, as it introduces even more new features and improvements when compared with the first Alpha release of the software.

Prominent features of Kodi 15.0 Alpha 2 include a new Chapter Selector window that allows users to easily browse and select chapters from MKV files or any other file format that supports chapters, Audio and Subtitle lists that help you easily find and select the subtitle and audio streams you are looking for, support for adjusting how the date and time are set, support for installing languages on a just-in-time basis, and Add-On Manager improvements.

“In many ways, we could call Isengard the release that finally answers many of the oldest requests we have,” says Martijn. “With Alpha1 we introduced Skip Steps, which allow the user to more naturally and organically find the exact moment they are attempting to skip to in the show or movie, a request that’s existed since at least 2009. We also implemented external subtitle support over UPnP, another very old feature request. This month, we’ve added a few more.”

There are numerous other small improvements in Kodi 15.0 Alpha 2

Of course, Kodi 15.0 Alpha 2 include numerous other small improvements and bugfixes. For example, Tuxbox has been removed in favor of the VUPlus PVR add-on, which can be used for Enigma2 boxes, support for the AFP filesystem has been removed, ‘jump to first unwatched’ functionality has been implemented in the TV section, the PVR add-ons have been split into separate projects, and some deprecated code from XBMC 11.0 has been removed.

Last but not least, season art scraping has been repaired and it now correctly adds new seasons, fetching of updates from the repository after a major upgrade of the software has been greatly improved, the installation process of new skins selection has been improved, various deprecated codecs have been removed and transformed into add-ons, and support for Windows DXVA HEVC hardware decoding has been added. You can download Kodi 15.0 Alpha 2 right now from Softpedia, but keep in mind that it is an unstable version.

Photo Gallery (4 Images)

Chapter Selector Window
Audio and Subtitle ListsLanguage Add-ons and an Expansion of International Options
+1more