The latest version of Kodi can be downloaded from Softpedia

Sep 11, 2014 08:10 GMT  ·  By

The XBMC developers are moving on and they are now working on Kodi, the successor of the XBMC project. The name change was announced a while ago and the devs have revealed some of the new features and changes in the new 14.x branch.

The latest stable release is XBMC 13.2, which brought a number of corrections and fixes to the software. In fact, the 13.x branch is one of the best releases made so far in the project, but the devs felt the name didn't really represent the software that they were making.

XBMC stands for Xbox Media Center, but the software hasn't lived up to this name in years. It became much more than that and it was the time for a change. This is why the name Kodi was chosen and, now, we'll soon get a new release with this designation.

Kodi to enter feature freeze

In fact, Kodi already has a few Alpha releases under its belt and the developers have said that they are going to place the software into feature freeze. This basically means that the devs' focus will move from new features to bug fixes, and it also means that we'll start seeing Beta releases pretty soon.

"For the average user, this means a couple things. First, you could be expecting to see Kodi Beta releases coming out in the very near future. Second, given our fairly well documented open development cycle, there should be very few surprises from then until the release of Helix. By definition, the features you see now are the same features you will see when Helix is released with the possible exception of some smaller updates in the default skin Confluence," say the devs in the announcement.

New features in the upcoming Kode 14.x release

The new codename for Kodi 14 is "Helix," and if everything goes according to the dev's plan, it will surpass any release made so far in terms of features, at least.

The developers have explained that the font size in Confluence skin can now be increased, 5.1 PCM playback for Android has been added, the option to choose between auto-update, notify, or off for updating add-ons has been added, the VP9 video codec now uses software multi-threading, the PVR add-ons have been updated, the GUI skinning engine has been improved, the FFMpeg component has been upgraded, mouse support in Blu-ray menus has been added, and scanning the library has received a massive speed boost.

These are just a few of the new things that we'll see in the new release. If you want to give it a go right now, you can download the latest Kodi 14.0 Alpha 3 from Softpedia, but keep in mind that it's still under development. It's quite possible that some of the old add-ons won't work with the new version.