The final release of Kodi 17 is just around the corner

Jan 15, 2017 23:03 GMT  ·  By

The wait is almost over, and you'll finally be able to enjoy a more modern, improved, and full of new technologies Kodi media center on your PC or HTPC device, be it an Apple TV or Raspberry Pi.

Martijn Kaijser announced the third Release Candidate (RC) development version for the Kodi 17.0 "Krypton" media center, and it looks to us like these pre-releases are getting smaller by the day, the RC3 build including only seven changes listed in the release notes attached to the official announcement.

"These Release Candidate builds are dedicated to gain further feedback from users who are willing to take the jump towards v17 and we sure are grateful if they do as that provides valuable information on general stability and usability," explained Martijn Kaijser. "Our team will certainly try to tackle as much of the reported problems as possible with the limited resources we have."

Here's what was changed/improved since Kodi 17 RC2

Since Kodi 17 RC2, which did not have a proper announcement, the development team managed to update Estuary, Kodi 17's new default skin, with various improvements and bug fixes, address an issue with the mouse cursor not reaching the right side of the screen on macOS platforms, and fix multiple EPG and PVR-related bugs.

Other than that, Kodi 17.0 Release Candidate 3 reverts a change from previous RCs that could have caused various video playback issues with some multimedia files, as well as patches some problems discovered on playing video files. Additionally, the RC3 updates CEC to version 4.0.1 and improves the CMake build system.

If you want to become an early adopter and help the Kodi development team with bug reports, go ahead and download Kodi 17 RC3 right now through our web portal and install it on your devices. Please try to keep in mind, though, that this is a pre-release version, which means that it isn't suitable for production use.

In related news, the Kodi team announced recently that they've decided to codename the Kodi 18 media center release as "Leia" after the Princess Leia Organa of Alderaa fictional character in the Star Wars franchise, which was played by the late Carrie Fisher. The decision was made to celebrate 40 years of Star Wars.