14 DAY TRIAL // The developers of the former XBMC (presently Kodi) have released the third Alpha release for the upcoming 14.x branch and they have made a number of important changes and improvements.
The XBMC name is going away and it will be soon replaced by Kodi, but until then the new software has to undergo a number of development releases. Strangely enough, the new name won't bring any new major changes because the devs are trying to make the versions as stable as possible.
"This months alpha release doesn't contain anything that could be picked out as a real "feature'. Most of the changes are under the hood and should further improve stability and user friendliness. However we will highlight some of the main visual changes so far."
"The virtual keyboard which included in Kodi has been the same for many years, with a set layout. From this alpha release, it's now possible to change the layout to some well of the well known ones, like QWERTY and AZERTY. Additionally there's also a Hebrew and Bulgarian layout included. Important: As an affect of this change you will notice that most of the third-party skins will now have a blank keyboard layout as they have not been updated yet," the announcement reads.
Another important change has been made to the add-ons. Uses will now be able to set the update procedure for the add-on to automatic and they don't have to worry about checking and manually updating all the time. It's also possible to just notify the user about an existing update, but without pre-downloading that new version.
According to the changelog, the ability to increase the font size in the Confluence skin, 5.1 PCM playback for Android has been added, MusicBrainz matching from tags has been improved, the ability to choose between auto-update, notify or off for updating add-ons has been implemented, the JSON-RPC service, which is used for by a variety of services and remotes, has been extended, the VP9 video codec now uses software multi-threading, and the core code has been simplified and improved.
Check the official announcement for more details about this release. You can download Kodi 14.0 “Helix” Alpha 3 right now from Softpedia or you can update if you already have a previous release installed.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.