The first Alpha builds are now available for download

Sep 4, 2015 10:37 GMT  ·  By

After pushing the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Kodi 15.2 maintenance version of Isengard (Kodi 15) to testers worldwide on the last day of August, the developers of the popular media center software formerly known as XBMC have the pleasure of informing us all about the codename and features of Kodi 16.

Therefore, we're happy to inform our readers today that the next major version of the open-source and cross-platform Kodi Media Center software, version 16.0, will be dubbed Jarvis and promises to bring attractive new features like DirectX 11 support, as well as the ability to stretch 4:3 content to a 16:9 aspect ratio without wrapping it.

There will also be an event logging implementation for tracking events in the media center, proper 24.0 Hz and 60.0 Hz refresh rate in the fake full-screen mode on Windows operating systems, and support for the "ARTISTS" tag of the MusicBrainz service in ID3v2, Xiph, and APE, while the Skin settings will no longer be part of the core Kodi settings.

"While we are still working on improving the Kodi 15 release by adding numerous fixes, developers have been working on new features and new fixes for Kodi 16, codenamed Jarvis, for quite some time now. Let’s take a look at a few of those features and fixes that have made it into alphas 1 and 2 of Kodi 16," says Martijn Kaijser.

The list of improvements to Kodi 16 is enormous

In addition to all the awesome features mentioned above, Kodi 16.0 will also add support for saving skin settings as add-on data, will bring imate resource add-ons to skin developers, will include a date stamp in the music library, which can be used for sorting items, and will adds a new "artist / year" sort method for sorting albums in chronological order per artist.

ADSP handling integration will also be available in Kodi 16 "Jarvis," along with TV series recording in PVR, the addition of a "none" option for your favorite subtitles, rearrange of various add-on categories, date formats improvements in translations, and caching algorithm and image resizing enhancements. The first Alpha builds of Kodi 16.0 are now available for download and testing.

Kodi 16 Alpha (5 Images)

Kodi 16.0 Jarvis
DirectX 11 upgrade4:3 Non-linear Stretch
+2more