Kodi 18 'Leia' is officially available -- download it NOW!
The Kodi Foundation pushed out the fifth and final Release Candidate of Kodi 18 two weeks ago, and after some minor bug fixes and improvements, the hugely popular cross-platform home theater software is finally judged ready for prime time.
If you’ve been waiting patiently for the official stable release of the new Kodi, the great news is you can download it now.
The developers have yet to announce the news, but the software is ready to download from the site, and you can check out the changelog here. As you might expect, there have been a lot of changes made to the software. Kodi 18 'Leia' is also the first 64-bit version for Windows.
Some of the highlights of the new version are:
- Added a Games window and Game OSD (On-Screen-Display) to the graphical user interface.
- Added a RetroPlayer player core supporting game clients addons as well as emulator cores.
- Added support for RDS (Radio Data System) for radio channels if the PVR backend client supports RDS.
- Changed GUI actions to eliminate duplicate and dead code (major GUI refactoring for PVR and LiveTV).
- Added, updated, and improved PVR backend clients addons for popular third-party external PVR backend platforms.
- Improved the input manager and input API system for keyboards, mice, and game controllers.
- Updated "Peripheral Addons" for game controllers, gamepads, joysticks, and input peripherals profiles.
- Added support for BD-J / Blu-ray Disc Java menu support.
- Added support for Blu-ray Disc detection and use provided meta data for Blu-ray Disc names.
- Added support for video buffers to be used by decoders and renderers.
- Improved Stereoscopic 3D playback of 3D videos (as well as better 2D playback of 3D videos).
- Added an option to rescan the music file tags for existing items in the library.
- Added additional artist data that Musicbrainz provides: type (person, group, orchestra, choir etc.), gender, and disambiguation comments that help to differentiate artists with the same name.
- Added support for Python (script) based web scrapers for Kodi.
- Added support to build Kodi with support for Bluetooth.
- Added support for speech-to-text in Kodi OSD keyboard on Android TV.
- Added support for Android to move the Kodi app to SD card.
- Added support for Android TV Leanback search and recommendations metadata from Kodi.
If you’re already running Kodi 17, you can download and install the latest release over your existing installation. Everything should work fine.
You can download Kodi 18 'Leia' for Windows, Mac and iOS, and for other platforms from here. Let me know what you think of it in the comments below.
Image Credit: Andrey_Popov / Shutterstock