Kodi v18 Leia RC2 - A new hope
After two years of hard work by all volunteers, either part of the team or of our great community we can finally say the last steps towards Kodi v18 are being made. In past years many things have changed, either visually or code wise and to be honest i can't even recall most. We as team would certainly like to thank every developer and user who spent time helping us get this far.
To this point the current v18 version has been proven to be quite solid to use as a daily driver for those who were brave enough to try it out. Of course you should still keep in mind it's not a final release yet and that on any upgrade a small glitch could happen as we are still doing rework. Once you decide to give it a try it is highly recommended that you create a backup first.
Changes in RC2
Most notable changes to mention in this Release Candidate:
- Update documentation regarding Python and Skin develoment: Kodi Doxygen
- Linux powermanagement: change logind detection to also use Dbus
- Android: Fix playback for some PVR add-ons
- Fix performance issue in PVR recording sub menu by reducing number of resume point update requests
- Android: Assign joysticks in order of MRU (last activation)
- Fix crash when an add-on did not define a version number
- VideoPlayer: fix state of a/v players after switching refresh rate
- Add new setting that allows to hide "spoiler" text for TV shows or movies
Of course there are several more changes which are listed on our github repository found here:
RC1 changes.
Currently included
To this point in time we’ve done
- More than 9386 commits (code chunks changed)
- More than 3000 pull-requests (collection of commits that were included in one go)
- More than 8638 changed files
- More than 503.000 code lines removed
- More than 427.000 code lines added
- Over 36 open source developers
- A lot of free time developing and testing these changes
- Quite likely several cases of beer or wine
A full changelog is nearly impossible to create looking back. As such this release article will only cover the biggest changes. For a more extensive list you can visit our wiki page
v18 (Leia) changelog which will be update along the way. From now on all v18 releases will not contain any big new features as we are focussed on bug fixing or improvements only.
Make sure to also go through our
news sections which contain all past announcements regarding the Leia release and some highlights of what it will contain.
Current available skins
Due to changes in how Kodi works, all skins need to be updated for each release. As of this moment the following skins have been update by their developers and are readily available from our repository.
Confluence,
Pellucid,
Rapier,
Transparency,
xperience1080
More will follow at a later point in time when we approach final release.
Release time
Since we now started the RC cycle a final release will be on the near horizon. When the final release will actually be is yet unknown as it all depends on the stability now more people will start using the v18 builds.
That’s about it for now and we’ll go back at improving this upcoming v18 release. Should you wish to give it a try a new version is readily available each day as well as nightly version. We can certainly recommend trying it out however take in mind that it’s not fully production and living room ready yet (take a backup). So far a guestimate of several tens of thousands users already use it so it can’t be that bad can it. You can get it from the download page clicking on the platform of choice and hitting the “pre release” tab. For
Android and
Windows we have an easy to use download add-on which you can find in our repository.
Kodi 18 RC2 x64
Kodi 18 RC2 x86
Kodi 18 RC ARM v7a 32bit
Kodi 18 RC2 ARM v8a 64bit