Download Kodi 17.0 ‘Krypton’ Alpha 2

The first alpha release of the cross-platform media center software Kodi 17 has been released, although that seems a bit strange with “Alpha 2” in the title. The first alpha version never came out, because a lot of code was changed. Thus, Alpha 1 was skipped.

One of the most important changes with previous versions is that the code is now more separate per component, which should make maintenance easier in the future, to write the developers on their blog. The DVD player, for example, was very intertwined with the entire program. Also, the way videos are rendered has changed and features included in newer versions of OpenGL are now addressed, such as dithering.

The most notable change is the retirement of the Confluence skin that has been the default skin since 2009. In V17, Estuary and Estouchy are the default skins. The latter is intended for touch screens. Confluence enthusiasts can of course pick these from the repository.

An extensive story about all the changes is too find on the Kodi site with some notable changes since 16.1 below:

Mention worthy changes

• 10bit/HEVC hardware enabled playback on INtel or NVIDIA GPU that have the capabilities (see hardware specs)
• Refactor of scrapers
• Fix possible high CPU usage with GUI rendering
• Playback improvement on all platforms
• Support for multiple external ratings and userrating from GUI and smartplaylists
• Audio and subtitle filter added to smartplaylists
• Use ffmpeg for loading certain types of images and drop external libraries
• Added PVR to event log feature
• Various database optimizations
• Unify behavior or context menu
• Improvements on binary add-on handling
• Rework of rendercapture which is used by boblight or ambilight implementations
• Removes SAP streams support
• Added MVC, framepack and 3D switching support on Raspberri-Pi
• Change certain settings from spinners to a list
• Further improvements on DirectX implementation
• Further unify certain skin windows to make it easier to make new skins without duplicating same code
• Music mood scanning
• Game controller add-ons
• Improved tag reading from music files
• Improvement on Kodi rendering system which should reduce CPU load and pave the way to headless some day
• Add InProgress node for TV Shows
• Fix CPU count on Android
• Various changes to Kodi python API. Please check documentation
• Save skin settings on early exit which should fix problems with loosing settings after restart
• Improved binary add-on API
• Improvements to internal web server
• Use number separators from the selected GUI language (example 1,000.4 / 1,000.4) and also apply this to ratings
• Update to FFmpeg 3.0 which brings improved playback, stability and security fixes
• Security and stability improvement by updating to: Python 2.7.12/mDNSResponder to 625.41.2 / libxslt 1.1.29 / libmicrohttpd to 0.9.50 / gettext 0.19.8 / libzip 1.1.2 / libjpeg-turbo 1.4.2 / libpng 1.6 .21 / lzo 2.09 / sqlite 3120200 / openssl 1.0.2h / taglib 1.11
• Enable IPv6 for CURL
• Added CMake building on all platforms. Still work in progress
• Switch to Visual Studio 2015 building
• Remove boost, CXimage, jpgIO, libsquish dependencies as they are obsolete
• Auto create code documentation with Doxygen including a to-do list (link: https://codedocs.xyz/xbmc/xbmc/)
• Moved old PyDocs of the Kodi API to Doxygen
• Added skinning API to Doxygen
• Removed dead and obsolete core code
• Fixed memory leaks
• Fixed possible code deadlocks
• Fixed possible security flaws
• Fixed possible crashes
• Fixed code flaws found by various analysis tools