Kodi Krypton Version 17 out

Kodi, the media center application, has been undergoing some massive updates lately, which has resulted in version 17 Krypton finally reaching a final release stage. 

Team Kodi are very happy to announce the immediate availability of Kodi 17.0 (Krypton) for Windows, Android, MacOS and iOS. Krypton brings updated default user interfaces, better organisation of settings, and many under-the-hood changes on VideoPlayer, Music Library, PVR, audio on Android, and thousands of small bugfixes and improvements to stability. Note: Kodi 17 downloads will be available in our Ubuntu PPA soon, so stay tuned for updates!

Grab Kodi here.

New look

Kodi’s user interfaces receive a major revision in Kodi 17.0. The new default skin Estuary has been specially designed as a 10-foot interface, while touchscreen devices have a new touch-enabled skin called Estouchy. To complete the overhaul we are now shipping Chorus2 as the default web interface. For those of you who like the previous skin, it is now available as an optional download through the add-on repository.

Audio and Video

Our video engine is undergoing a multi-phase rewrite and Kodi 17.0 delivers the next wave of changes with improvements to stability, audio/video synchronisation, refresh rate switching and decoding/encoding of video on all platforms. New inputstream add-ons extend support for streaming protocols like RTMP, MPEG-DASH, SmoothStream and NXMSL. Other new additions include hardware-accelerated DVD playback and OpenGL dithering when performing colour conversion, and Kodi on Linux can now use 3DLUT and simple ICC profiles to colour-correct displays. Audio sinks on most platforms have also been refined.

Music

Changes to the music library bring improved performance for tag scraping, support for mood and artist role tags, and increased browsing speed for larger libraries.

Live TV and PVR

Kodi 17.0 has numerous improvements to Live TV and PVR functionality. Changes start in the user interface with widgets for Recent Recordings and Last Played Channels on the home screen, and the ability to choose showing the PVR guide or Channel window when Kodi starts. The PVR user interface has seen much love. Channels can be sorted by Last Played. TV and Radio recordings are now shown in separate windows. There is a huge performance increase when browsing the guide window. Scheduling of recordings had a complete rewrite with both timers and timer rules now displayed in separate windows, and instant recording options can be customised. There are now 15+ PVR add-ons and most have been updated, including VDR VNSI, Tvheadend, HDHomeRun, Enigma2 and MythTV. Kodi now comes with support in the back-end for Digital Devices Octopus Net and asynchronous connections to back-ends which helps with connection stability.

Android

Kodi 17.0 is now standards-compliant with Android’s official Audio API and requires Android 5.0 or higher as the minimum version. DTS-HD, DTS-X, Dolby TrueHD, and Dolby ATMOS passthrough are now supported on devices that implement AudioTrack v23 or higher. Devices with firmware that does not follow this standard will not support passthrough. Support for 4K video and output and improvements to refresh rate switching and HEVC, VC-1 / WMV 9, and VP9 playback on supported hardware are the icing on the cake.

Windows

Kodi 17.0 is the first version available through the Windows Store and is now one of the most popular downloads in the store. The version in the Store wraps our normal x86 application in a UWP wrapper for installing on Windows 10. The normal installer from the download section of the website can be used on Windows 7 and 8 (and 10).