Kodi media center, formerly known as XBMC Media Center, is an award-winning free and open source cross-platform media player feels very natural to use from the couch and is the ideal solution for your home theater. Currently Kodi can be used to play almost all popular audio and video formats around. It was designed for network playback, so you can stream your multimedia from anywhere in the house or directly from the internet using practically any protocol available. Use your media as-is: Kodi can play CDs and DVDs directly from the disk or image file, almost all popular archive formats from your hard drive, and even files inside ZIP and RAR archives. It will even scan all of your media and automatically create a personalized library complete with box covers, descriptions, and fanart. There are playlist and slideshow functions, a weather forecast feature and many audio visualizations.
Once installed, your computer will become a fully functional multimedia jukebox. More than 50 software developers have contributed to Kodi, and 100-plus translators have worked to expand its reach, making it available in more than 30 languages. It uses a 10-foot user interface designed to be a media player for the living-room, using a remote control as the primary input device. Its graphical user interface (GUI) allows the user to easily browse and view videos, photos, podcasts, and music from a harddrive, optical disc, local network, and the internet using only a few buttons. Kodi is fully Open-Source and released under the GPLv2.0+ license. It includes many third-party libraries which use compatible licenses. Due to the inclusion of some GPLv3.0 libraries the entire application becomes GPLv3.0 as binary.
kodi

kodi

kodi

Notable changes in Kodi 17.0:

  • Added enhancement/improvements to PVR addon API (connection state change handling, asynchronous updates & more)
  • Added support for navigation controls between EDL (commercial skipping) during PVR recodings playback
  • Added support for sorting channels by 'last played' in the Channels window
  • Added a new API level system to binary addons, refactoring the binary addon library interface for Kodi
  • Added a new input system with an API for keyboard and game controllers as "Peripheral Addons"
  • Added a new default skin called Estuary, with themes & colors, (moving Confluence to addon repo)
  • Added initial support for Audio DSP (Digital Signal Processing) plugins and addons for Kodi's AudioEngine
  • Improved the default cross-platform event driven active state machine pattern ActiveAE (Kodi's AudioEngine)
  • Added new CMake based build system of Kodi and binary addons for Linux.
  • Added multi-architecture/distribution support to Kodi's CMake build system for Linux
  • Added support for HEVC Main 10 profile (10-bit) hardware video decoding via VAAPI if hardware support it
  • Added support for VP9 hardware video acceleration via VAAPI if supported by display drivers
  • Added support for EGL for X11 (which adds zero copy rendering for VAAPI)
  • Added support for Clang compiler building of Kodi
  • Added warning that GNU Build System (Autotools) will be removed soon as deprecated
  • Improved multi-touch support, and improved touch and gesture support on Linux
  • Improved support for UltraHD decoding / 4K resolution output when hardware supports it
  • Improved VAAPI (Video Acceleration API) support (requires VAAPI compatible hardware and drivers)
  • Improved VDPAU (NVIDIA) Hardware Video Acceleration (requires VDPAU compatible hardware and drivers)
  • Improved XvBA (AMD/ATI) Hardware Video Acceleration (requires XvBA compatible hardware and drivers)
  • Improved dedicated AMLCodec hardware accelerated video decoding support for Linux on Amlogic devices
  • Improved AMD/Intel x86-64 64-bit (AMD64 / IA-64t CPU architectures) support under Linux
  • Removed Wayland display server protocol support (as depended heavily on removed Boost C++ libraries)
  • Removed all Boost (C++ libraries) and libsquish as dependencies
  • And many more fixes & changes.

How to Install Kodi 17 Krypton:

Kodi 17 Available for Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety/16.04 Xenial/14.04 Trusty/Linux Mint 18/17/other related Ubuntu derivatives, Kodi 14.2 Helix is available for Ubuntu 12.04 Precise/Linux Mint 13
To install Kodi 17 in Ubuntu/Linux Mint open Terminal (Press Ctrl+Alt+T) and copy the following commands in the Terminal:

Addons (such as PVR) available for Kodi, use package name with sudo apt-get install command to install addon.
PVR Package Name Description
kodi-pvr-dev Kodi Media Center (PVR Add-on Dev package)
kodi-pvr-argustv Kodi PVR Addon Argustv
kodi-pvr-demo Kodi PVR Demo Addon
kodi-pvr-dvbviewer Kodi PVR Addon Dvbviewer
kodi-pvr-iptvsimple Kodi PVR Iptv Addon
kodi-pvr-mediaportal-tvserver Kodi PVR Addon Mediaportal Tvserver
kodi-pvr-mythtv Kodi PVR Addon MythTv - Cmyth
kodi-pvr-nextpvr Kodi PVR Addon NextPvr
kodi-pvr-njoy Kodi PVR Addon Njoy
kodi-pvr-tvheadend-hts Kodi PVR Addon TvHeadend Hts
kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi Kodi PVR Addon VDR Vnsi
kodi-pvr-vuplus Kodi PVR Addon Vuplus
kodi-pvr-dvblink DVBLink PVR
kodi-pvr-filmon FilmOn PVR
kodi-pvr-hts TVHeadEnd PVR
kodi-pvr-pctv PCTV PVR
kodi-pvr-stalker Stalker PVR
kodi-pvr-vbox VBox Home TV Gateway PVR client
kodi-pvr-wmc WMC PVR
shairplay Free portable AirPlay server implementation


Kodi is also available for Android.

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