14 DAY TRIAL // The Kodi team proudly announced today, February 5, 2017, the general availability of the final release of the Kodi 17 "Krypton" open-source media center for Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, and Windows.
Kodi 17 "Krypton" is a major release with numerous improvements across many of its components, including PVR, VideoPlayer, and Music Library, better organization of settings, better audio support on Android, as well as an updated user interface with a new default skin called Estuary.
"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," explained the Kodi developers in today's announcement.
Here's what's new in Kodi 17
Prominent features of Kodi 17 "Krypton" include support for artist role tags, performance improvements to tag scraping, better handling of huge libraries when they are browsed, better audio and video synchronization, enablement of video decoding and encoding on all supported platforms, and refresh rate switching.
A bunch of new inputstream extensions have been added to implement support for additional protocols, including SmoothStream, Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP), NXMSL, and MPEG-DASH. When performing color conversion, there's now OpenGL dithering support, as well as hardware-accelerated DVD playback.
3DLUT support was added for Kodi on Linux platforms, along with simple ICC profiles for colour-correct displays. Kodi 17 is now compliant with Android's standard Audio API, which means that you'll need to have at least Android 5.0 running on your device. Additionally, the audio skins have been revamped on all supported platforms.
A lot of work was done for the Android platform during the Kodi 17 "Krypton" development cycle and Dolby TrueHD, Dolby ATMOS, DTS-X, and DTS-HD passthrough are now supported on devices that feature AudioTrack version 23 or later. Furthermore, Kodi 17 brings 4K video support, as well as VP9, VC-1/WMV 9, and HEVC playback.
Kodi 17 also adds a lot of improvements to the Live TV and PVR (Personal Video Recorder) components, among which we can mention new widgets for Last Played Channels and Recent Recordings, the ability to select if Kodi will display either the Channel window or PVR guide on start, and numerous enhancements to the PVR UI.
Moreover, users will be able to sort channels by Last Played, Kodi will now display Radio and TV recordings in separate windows, the scheduling of recordings was rewritten to display timer rules and timers in separate windows, and it's possible to customize the options for the instant recording functionality.
Last but not least, Kodi 17 comes bundled with more than 15 new PVR add-ons, and many of the existing ones were updated. These include MythTV, VDR VNSI, Enigma2, HDHomeRun, and Tvheadend. There's also support for asynchronous connections and Digital Devices Octopus Net support in the backend.
Kodi 17 "Krypton" adds numerous under-the-hood improvements, and we recommend checking out the full changelog if you want to know what bugs were fixed, etc. Kodi 17 is now available for download for GNU/Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems and it's coming soon for Ubuntu users via an official PPA.
