14 DAY TRIAL // Only two weeks after XBMC Foundation announced the decision to codename the Kodi 18 release as "Leia," after the late Carrie Fisher, but also to celebrate 40 years of the Star Wars saga, they are today releasing what it could be the last Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Kodi 17 "Krypton" media center.
Martijn Kaijser has announced today the availability of Kodi 17.0 RC4, which comes about 11 days after the third Release Candidate. Kodi 17 development is ongoing since December 2015, but the first Alpha builds arrived six months later, around May 2016, and it now finally looks like the final release of the open-source media center is nearing its official launch.
A total of 12 issues have been patched since Kodi 17 RC3, but your help is now needed more than ever to test drive this fourth Release Candidate and report any bugs you might encounter. New improvements include the ability to change song ratings, smaller timeouts for some audio streams, miscellaneous updates to the Estouchy and Estuary skins, better support for devices running Android 7 "Nougat," and better refreshing of favorites.
"Our team will certainly try to tackle as much of the reported problems as possible with the limited resources we have. We do want to note that since we are just a small team some of the reported bugs might not get fixed due to lack of developers or time. As such we would certainly welcome any developer who has the ability to help us out to try and fix the bugs he or she encounters and submit it to our code base for review," said Martijn Kaijser in today's announcement.
Default Chorus2 web interface received much-needed work
Other enhancements added in Kodi 17 RC4 include removal of the changes implemented in a previous development release because they disabled the plugin listing cache causing slower browsing speeds, multiple improvements and some new features to the default Chorus2 web interface, as well as the ability to stop playback before uninstalling PVR (Personal Video Recorder) add-ons.
It also looks like uninstalling or installing PVR add-ons might have caused deadlocks, so that's fixed too. Kodi 17 RC4 should also make it easier to retry the installation of failed add-ons and improves the handling of graphics failures because of outdated video drivers on Microsoft Windows platforms. Lastly, users will now be able to add their add-ons to favorites via the built-in add-on manager.
If you want to take Kodi 17 "Krypton" for a test drive now, you can download the Release Candidate 4 builds for GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and other supported operating systems from the official website or via ours. Please try to keep in mind, though, that this is a pre-release version designed to identify bugs and for other testing purposes, so don't use it in a production environment.