The developers are close to another release of Kodi

Aug 11, 2015 14:52 GMT  ·  By

Kodi, a media player and entertainment hub that used to be named XBMC up until a few months ago, is preparing another major upgrade, and developers have released a Release Candidate for the 15.1 version.

The recent release of Kodi 15.0 Isengard was a successful one and it's clear that this media hub is now the best one money can buy. That's of course speaking figuratively since Kodi is open source and completely free. It's also part of a few distros, including the famous OpenELEC, not to mention that it works like a dream on Raspberry Pi 2.

Kodi 15.0 Isengard was an important step forward and many changes have been made, but this is a very complex piece of software. This means that even if a new stable update looks perfect, it rarely is. This is why maintenance versions like the current 15.1 that is being prepared are needed, to fix issues that have been found in the meantime or discovered by the community.

Kodi 15.1 Isengard RC is ready for testing

"Once a 'final' version is released some new bugs and/or problems usually appear out of nowhere, and last release was no exception. Even though tens of thousands of users were already testing the 15.0 version before release, as soon as million started using it, some problems we either did not think of or which we did not notice popped up. To counter some of these new issues, we’re bringing you this maintenance release candidate called 15.1 RC1 which has some additional fixes on top of the 15.0 release," say the devs.

According to the changelog, renderbuffers are now flushed when flushing the video player, a broken network.bandwidth setting has been fixed, some PVR  stuttering has been corrected, a crash that occurred when trying do delete a file in filemanager has been repaired, and FFMpeg has been upgraded to version 2.6.4.

You can download Kodi 15.1 RC from Softpedia and give it a go. It's not a stable iteration, so please don't use it on a production machine.