Download Kodi 17.0 Beta 1

The first beta version of Kodi 17.0 was made available earlier this week as you could read in the news corner. This cross platform media center software is developed for Windows, OS X, Linux, Android and iOS. In version 17.0, the ability to play 10bit and hevc material has been added, in combination with Intel or Nvidia GPUs that support this. The default skin has also been changed to Estuary and for touch screen devices it has become Estouchy. According to the developers, the differences between the first beta version and the third alpha are small, it mainly concerns minor fixes and improvements under the skin. The announcement of this release looks like this:

Kodi v17 “Krypton” Beta 1

We are excited to announce the first beta of Kodi 17, codenamed Krypton. Kodi 17 features a huge amount of work in areas like video playback, live TV and PVR/DVR, the music library, skinning and more. It features a new default skin, as well as a new default touchscreen skinned, named Estuary and Estouchy, respectively.

The changes between Alpha 3 and Beta 1 are mainly limited to minor fixes and under the hood improvements, so for this first beta, we’ll instead take some time to review a few of the really visible changes in Kodi 17.

Estuary and Estouchy
Without question, the biggest visual change from Kodi 16 to 17 is the new default skin Estuary. This skin pulls a dramatic amount of content to the homescreen, including much from your music and video libraries, commonly used add-ons, and links to adding new video/music sources and installing new add-ons. It also enables color and theme changes within the skin, and overall pulls Kodi into the present day of UI design. For a full review of Estuary (and its touchscreen counterpart Estouchy), see the Estuary blog post. It should be noted that this is only the default skin. You are, of course, welcome to continue using whatever skin you might prefer, including the previous default skin Confluence.

A Cleaner, Clearer Settings Section
The Kodi settings area has always seemed to require some sort of advanced degree (or a similar amount of related experience) to navigate effectively. With that in mind, we have spent the better part of a year cleaning up and reorganizing Settings with the ultimate goal of making the section, if not friendly, then at least clearer for new and journeymen Kodi users. We’ve also made it possible to point Kodi to new media sources from the settings menu, a requested feature for many years.

An Improved Music Library
Many would argue that the Kodi music library has not seen the same degree of development and support as the video library over the past few years. With Kodi 17, that has changed. The improved music library now supports better tag reading and scraping, better handling of albums and artists with the addition of adding artist role (such as composer, conductor, DJ, etc.). Additionally, certain files and websites support musical “mood,” which means you can now select your music based on mood, rather than artist or genre.

Live TV and PVR/DVR Improvements
For a full list, see the Kodi Alpha 3 write-up, but the Live TV and PVR/DVR component of Kodi has seen just as much improvement with Krypton as the music library. Channels can now be organized by last played, so if you really only watch 5 or 6 of your 300 channels, those can always be at the top of the list. Timers and Timer Rules are now clearer and better organized and timers are much smarter now. For example, if you set a Timer to record one episode of a show, you can transform it so that it records an entire series. And that’s really only the cream on top. Check the alpha 3 blog post for more. Finally, only the channels you actually watch need be listed at the top.

VideoPlayer
While the average user might not notice this massive under-the-hood improvement, we feel remiss in not mentioning it. The switch from Kodi’s old DVDPlayer to the new, modern VideoPlayer may be one of the most massive re-writes in Kodi’s long history. A longer, and more detailed discussion of the changes in VideoPlayer may be found in the Alpha 2 write-up, but the important take-away is that this rewrite likely won’t affect users much right now, but should vastly improve the Kodi experience over the next few years.

With that said, there are some improvements you may see right away. In particular, DVD playback finally has hardware acceleration. A/V syncing has improved. Video streams can now be selected, just like different language audio streams or subtitles, useful for things like concert DVDs, where you can now select the various different camera angles, but perhaps more importantly useful for switching between different bitrates in Youtube and other online streaming sources using the DASH protocol. At present, the Youtube add-on in the Kodi repo has not yet been updated to handle this new support, but we hope to see that update in the near future.

conclusion
As previously noted, this is only a small summary of all the improvements in Kodi 17. For more, see the Alpha 2 and Alpha 3 posts.

Should you want to download and install this build please visit our download page. You can install this build just on top of your current Kodi installation. Please report any problems on our forum and not on the release announcement. Don’t forget we also have some official tablet/phone remote controls for both Android and iOS. You can find the links to them on the download page.