The media hub is almost ready to go stable

Jul 3, 2015 09:57 GMT  ·  By

Kodi, a media player and entertainment hub that carried the XBMC name up until a few months ago, has been upgraded once more, and the first RC for the 15.0 Isengard version is now available for download.

Kodi is starting to replace XBMC in the public's mind, and the developers have made sure that each new release since the name has been changed is more impressive than the previous one. The same can be said about Kodi 15.0, which already promises to bring a huge number of new features and changes.

The developers of Kodi have moved very fast with this new branch and they have done some additional work as well. We recently reported that Kodi now has a new official Android remote, and we already know that the media hub is also available on Google Play. It looks like the team has been very busy, and they don't seem to have encountered any major problems, and that means the stable edition should be really close.

Kodi 15.0 Isengard RC1 is a big update

"Here it is, the first Release Candidate (RC) built for Kodi 15.0; freshly baked and ready to be served! Although we said that Kodi 15.0 is a “clean-up” edition, we still managed to squeeze in a couple of really nice features. So far we had around 1050 code change requests which were included since Kodi 14.2. This vast amount sums up in a pretty big list of improvements and clean-up being done by various developers for which we should show our everlasting gratitude," noted the devs.

According to the changelog, PVR section has been improved, skin support and new PVR add-ons have been added, FFMpeg has been updated to version 2.6.2, the CC (Closed Captions) support for Live TV has been refined, it's now possible to enable subtitles over UPnP, Android HEVC H.265 support for some chipsets has been added, the AFP filesystem support has been removed, and much more.

You can download Kodi 15.0 RC1 from Softpedia and give it a go. It's not a stable iteration, so please don't use it on a production machine.