Kodi Media Center for Android is available on Play Store

The developers of Kodi have released the first public beta of the app in the Google Play Store: version 15.0 Isengard beta 2. A new feature in the 15.0 version is adaptive seeking, which allows you to jump through audio or video files in smaller or larger steps. turn into.

Previously, Android users could only get the new version of Kodi, formerly XBMC, by joining the Kodi alpha or beta groups on Google+ and then registering as a tester through the Play Store. This is no longer the case since Sunday and the application can be downloaded directly from the Store on a phone, tablet or Android TV set-top box.

The list of changes can be found here. In addition to adaptive seeking, there is also support for hevc h265 on certain chipsets and a switch to C++11 for the code. As a result, the minimum specifications have increased. Android requires at least Android 4.2, but preferably 5.0 or higher, the developers write on their own site.

The latter mainly has to do with being able to adjust the refresh rate on Android, something that was one of the major limitations of the Android platform. Not being able to adjust the refresh rate could cause videos to stutter or audio to stay out of sync. Since Android 5.0 there is a way to set the desired refresh rate of a video. The functionality is still in an early phase and not all devices with Android 5.0 or higher have implemented this properly within their own firmware. So it is possible that one device supports the function and the other does not. The ability to adjust the refresh rate must be turned on manually.

Support for playing 4k content has also been added. Although true 4k support for external applications like Kodi will only appear in Android M, the developers have managed to implement it in 5.x, not least because Nvidia’s Shield Android TV also uses Kodi.