14 DAY TRIAL // Kodi, a media player and entertainment hub that carried the XBMC name, has been upgraded and moves closer to the final version of the 16.0 branch.
The Kodi developers are making good progress with their application, and it looks like they are approaching the final version. More important features have been added to the media hub, and it appears that it's going to be one of the most interesting releases made until now.
We already know that the developers have been working to implement multi-touch support for the Linux platform, but they are making changes to the Windows builds, like the support for Direct X 11, which was sorely lacking.
Kodi 16.0 Beta is ready for testing
"After four months of alpha versions we have changed to the beta stage and working towards a final Kodi 16 release. The past four months the developers worked hard behind the scenes on further improving what is already a great piece of software. Lot’s of code clean-up and improving stability, with a dash of features added here and there," write the developers in the official announcement.
According to the changelog, image resizing has been revised, support has been added for the musicbrainz “ARTISTS” tag in id3v2, ape, xiph, date has been added to music library, series recording has been added for PVR, the playback of VP9 and VC1 video codecs on Android has been fixed, touch-screen keymapping has been improved, the DX11 implementation in Windows has been enhanced, and various PVR fixes and improvements have been implemented.
You can download Kodi 16.0 Beta from Softpedia and give it a go. It's not a stable iteration, so please don't use it on a production machine. Also, please keep in mind that some of the add-ons might not work with the new version of Kodi.