The developers have great news for users

Oct 20, 2014 15:56 GMT  ·  By

Kodi 14.0 is the successor of the current XBMC project and it will be out in a few months, but until then, the developers have detailed some of the changes and improvements that will be made available with this new release.

The XBMC project is coming to an end, but only from the naming point of view. The developers have decided to drop the XBMC designation, which originally stood for Xbox Media Center. It's no longer performing those functions, and in fact, it's much more than just that.

The new name they chose for their product is Kodi, but the new version that will carry this name is not here yet. It's still under development and the current stable iteration of the software is XBMC 13.2, which was made available just a few weeks ago. It's worth pointing out that just because the name has been changed, it doesn't mean that the scope, features, and design of the original app will be modified as well.

What are some of the improvements in Kodi 14.0

The new Kodi will be a massive release, and that can be easily deduced from the changes announced by the developers of the application. In fact, there are so many that it's difficult to list them all, although some of them are for other platforms besides Linux.

"The first beta release is nearing pretty fast. At this moment we are only waiting for one more final change to happen and then we are good to go. We are only talking a week or two at most. About three weeks have past since but, yet we haven't sat still. The list of changes and improvements continues to grow. Although we also said feature freeze was in effect, we still found some things that were worth including in the upcoming release. These changes had little impact on stability or have been tested quite thoroughly."

"As for this Helix release, so far there have only been small things changed in regards to add-ons. So we are happy to say that almost all add-ons that worked in Gotham, will also work in Helix. There are of course some exceptions, however this should be only be a minimal amount," note the developers.

One of the features of the application that will receive some attention is the Personal Video Recorder (PVR), which will have much faster channel switching. Also, the Raspberry Pi platform will be able to better run the application, with the help of some improvements for better audio resampling, the file handling system is now much better, and numerous other tweaks have been implemented.

The Beta version is still a couple of weeks away, but in the meantime users can download Kodi 14.0 Alpha 4 from Softpedia and give it a go.