The latest version of Kodi can be downloaded from Softpedia

Aug 12, 2014 07:40 GMT  ·  By

The developers of the former XBMC (presently Kodi) have announced that the second Alpha release for the upcoming 14.x branch has been released.

Users will find that the XBMC name has only a few months left to live and it will be replaced by Kodi. XBMC stands for Xbox Media Center, but it's just a remnant of the past that had no real connection with the software that originally carried that title.

That being said, the new Kodi 14.x has been dubbed Helix, but the developers don't actually have big plans for it. In fact, it seems that they intend to focus more on stability and other issues than adding new major features.

“Kodi 14, which we gave the codename ‘Helix,’ is shaping up to be what is often called a ‘stability’ release. In software development, many projects operate on a sort of tick-tock release schedule. The ‘tick’ often introduces new features, dramatically alters the UI, and can likely dramatically alter the underlying framework of the software.”

“The ‘tock on the other hand, goes back and cleans up the code, fixing old incompatibilities, eliminating UI inconsistencies, and often preparing the groundwork for the next major tick. Where Gotham was quite definitely a ‘tick,’ Helix is shaping up to be a ‘tock’,” note the developers.

Kodi 14.x will ship with FFMpeg 2.2.4, which means that the software will be capable of playing files that use h.265 (also known as HEVC) and VP9 video codecs. The main advantage for this type of format is the enhanced compression. The devs say that a 40 GB file could be compressed to 20 GB and a 1 GB file could be compressed to 500 MB without noticing any kind of loss in perceivable quality.

Another major improvement that will definitely be remarked by users is for the Library, which should become a lot faster. Also, the software should interact much better with servers such as PlayOn and MediaBrowser.

According to the changelog, the PVR add-ons have been updated, the PVR windows have been redesigned, a number of improvements to the GUI skinning engine have been implemented, the JSON-RPC interface has been extended, and countless smaller and larger bug fixes have been implemented throughout the program.

Check the official announcement for more details about this release. You can download Kodi 14.0 “Helix” Alpha 2 right now from Softpedia.

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.