14 DAY TRIAL // Kodi 14.0, the successor of the famous media hub XBMC, has been released. The developers have been working on this new version for some time and it's finally here.
A large part of the Linux community heard about XBMC and the various projects integrating this excellent media hub. The name is actually an acronym and it stands for Xbox Media Center.
Unfortunately, this particular feature hasn't been working for years now, so the name wasn't relevant anymore. The devs wanted to show that the project has evolved tremendously and the best way to do that was to change the name.
That means that XBMC fans don't have to worry, their favorite application is not going anywhere. It's just a name change and everything that you loved about it is present in Kodi. In fact, Kodi should be much better than the previous release. A lot of new features have been implemented in the 14.0 version and it's a good time to upgrade if you already have the old one installed.
Kodi 14.0 is a massive release
After a lot of development releases, including three RCs, the final version of Kodi has arrived. It's packed with features and changes that go well beyond just the name change, which makes Kodi 14.0 a very interesting iteration of the media hub.
"To begin, Kodi has been updated to use FFMpeg 2.4.4. For users, this means Kodi will now be capable of playing back h.265 (also known as HEVC) and VP9 video codecs. The use of HEVC and VP9 could result in dramatically smaller video files sizes with exactly the same level of quality."
"Kodi is now significantly more compatible with servers like PlayOn and MediaBrowser, as client-related bugs have been dealt with. Further, communication between Kodi UPnP clients and Kodi UPnP servers continues to improve with proper or additional support for categories like date added, ratings, votes, and artwork, along with sorting for those new categories. UPnP search functions are also slowly working their way into Kodi," reads the official announcement.
The developers have also explained that it would be a good idea to back up the library and the settings before upgrading from XBMC 13.2. It's also possible that the old themes won't work, with the exception of Confluence, which is the default in the new edition.
Other improvements that have been implemented included better control over the addons, a better library selection, support for ATSC sub-channels, and even a virtual keyboard. You can download Kodi 14.0 from Softpedia and give it a go.
