It’s been two years in development, but the next big release for Kodi is nearly here.
Today the hugely popular home theater software hits a major milestone, with the arrival of the first Release Candidate for Kodi 18 ‘Leia’ — RC1. This release should be much more stable that the five previous betas, and the Kodi Foundation shares the following stats:
- More than 9386 commits (code chunks changed)
- More than 3000 pull-requests (collection of commits that were included in one go)
- More than 8638 changed files
- More than 503.000 code lines removed
- More than 427.000 code lines added
- Over 36 open source developers
- A lot of free time developing and testing these changes
- Quite likely several cases of beer or wine
So what are the main changes in Kodi 18? Well, there’s a 64-bit version, DRM (Digital Rights Management) support is included, and the Estuary interface and settings have been improved, as have the Music and Live TV sections. Kodi also no longer runs on Windows Vista, which is bad news for the five people still using it.
The binary repository, which is home to some of the features removed from the Kodi installer, has been finalized for Windows, macOS and Android, meaning the application download is now around half the size it used to be.
Additional changes are listed here.
To download the release candidate, go to the Official download page, select your platform of choice and you’ll find it under the pre-release tab. For Android and Windows there is an easy-to-use download add-on available in Kodi’s repository.