Kodi 17 Krypton Beta 3 released

The Kodi(Formerly XBMC) project has released Kodi 17 Krypton Beta 3, latest development release for upcoming stable v17. This release ships fixes for various bugs reported in previous development releases.

Kodi 17 is doing major reworks in key areas like video playback, live TV, PVR/DVR, the music library ..etc. Also it features a new default skin and a touch screen specific skin to capture touch events easily. All these works were done in previous development releases, what is left is extensive testing a lot of bugs detected by community testers have been addressed on this development release.

Credit : Kodi website

The major bug fixes in Kodi 17 beta 3 can be listed as:

• Fix album rating which should show as 0-10 compared to 0-5 before
• Add ability to JSON-RPC to return user ratings
• Fix mouse focus offset on buttons in EPG window
• Check on selected fanart pack in Estuary
• Fix WAV playback on Windows
• Add proper screen scale for latest iOS devices
• Add time button on PVR information dialog
• Fix certain bugs and improve RenderCpature which is use for Boblight
• Fix unloading of EPG data on exiting the application
• Fix on handling CUE sheet
• Add some additional music roles in the Music sections
• Fix possible deadlock on using PVR as startup window
• Don’t use hyphens in front of temperature as they might make it seem as negative temperature
• Exclude singles in recently played albums
• Show text during migrations tasks like database and add-ons upgrade
• Fix PVR not working after using the login screen
• Improve handling of event where displayed changed on Windows which could cause a crash
• Add possibility to get information from both .nfo and scraper
• Fix packaging of binary add-ons on Android builds
• Fix video playback on older Mac Mini devices
• Workaround amlogic passthrough on devices running Android 5
• Fix fontsetting on switching skins
• Fix ghost timers on certain PVR clients
• Fix DVD menu playback and audio
• Fix crashing on OSX with playing DVDs
• Require a click on slider before you can change it. Click again to accept the change and continue navigation
• Variety of fixes to video playback
• Various skin fixes and changes

For more information, you can see release announcement and a complete list of bugs fixed in this release.

Kodi team warns users about unofficial addons

Kodi Media Center team has warned users to be careful while choosing unofficial add-ons. A few incidents were reported, where newly installed add-ons removed existing add-ons without user permission or knowledge. Even though Kodi team is not mentioning add-on developers explicitly, they wants users to be aware of this situation.

Though Kodi team is not guaranteeing 100% safety in using addons from official repository, it is comparatively much safer.

Since v10.0  which was the first version with an add-on repository, we as team have always checked the contents of each add-on and what it’s intentions are before it was added. This is done with the intention to prevent unwanted things happening when installing certain add-ons and upholding a certain quality standard. To give a better understanding on what this entails I will provide a short walk through of this process before these add-ons are added to our official repo. First of all a third-party developer writes a certain add-on and decides if he wants to make it available for public testing first for initial user feedback, or directly send it to us depending how confident he/she is about the functionality. We urge every developer to first read our repository rules before sending the add-on for review as that might already make it clear it will never be considered.

For more information, see official blog post published by Kodi team.

 

Kodi Media Center 16.1 – Jarvis – Mark XVI released with several bug fixes

The Kodi Media Center(earlier XBMC) team announced availability of Kodi 16.1, first maintenance release in Kodi 16.x Jarvis series. Kodi is a free and open source, cross platform supported media center that can be used for streaming different multimedia formats either stored in local storage devices or from remote locations.

This release of Kodi includes fixes for several issues reported by users across the globe. Kodi 16.1 can be directly installed without removing previous 16.0 installation.

Some of the fixes made in Kodi 16.1 includes:

• Never cache addons directories
• Fix typo when calculating forced ratio size
• AndroidStorageProvider: Ignore /mnt/runtime and don’t call Exists all the way every some 500 ms as this will affect performance
• Set of fixes for DirectX rendering
• Fixed crash under JSON-RPC on iOS/OSX
• 20% performance gain on opening EPG guide window
• Add missing libgif.so to the Android package
• Fix Kodi freezing if no ADSP add-on is present
• EventServer security fix by only allowing localhost
• Fix possible lockup when entering EPG grid
• Fix possible problems with rendering on Windows
• Fix possible non working key presses after a key long press
• Don’t do a video chapter skip if there’s only one chapter
• Fix possible lock up by increasing timeout to let screensavers properly exit
• Fix render capture (bookmark images) on certain hardware with DXVA on Windows
• Fix problem in ZeroConfBrowser that could cause problems on exit
• Fix crash one OSX 10.7 when trying to resolve HDD names
• Fix possible crashes when using VAAPI and DXVA video rendering
• Fix song reported on playback of songs from cuesheet

See original release announcement in official Kodi portal.

Kodi Media Center announces two brand new themes

The Kodi team announced plan to introduce two brand new themes in future releases of Kodi Media Center. Kodi, which was formerly known as XBMC is an award winning open source media center which is capable of playing videos, audios, pictures, games and more.

It was long back in 2009, Kodi team introduced a new theme, when Kodi was known as XBMC. Since then, Kodi is using same theme for years, though there are some minor tweaks and improvements. Now Kodi team is unveiling two, yes, two themes.

From official announcement:

Many months of hard work have been put into these two new skins as that’s how long it takes to build a new skin from the ground up. Mainly team members Phil65, Piers and ronie have been working in secret creating these brand new beautiful skins that will become the new look and feel for Kodi. Build from the ground up with the main focus on using the latest features in the best way possible. Additionally they had a lot help of some core developers on getting the needed changes done to Kodi and the rest of the team for getting most of the testing done.

Both skins are installed by default and most users will start with Estuary while iOS users will start with Estouchy.

Read complete announcement and see more screen shots in Kodi portal.