Kodi 15.0 - Isengard - One Release to Rule Them All
Nathan Betzen
We are proud to announce the release of Kodi 15.0. No new name this time around, but many new features that cover requests both more than 5 years old and less than 5 months old. Let’s take a quick look at a few.
Kodi for Android
Perhaps the biggest news for Kodi 15 isn’t a feature at all, but rather the official release of Kodi for Android in the Google Play store. As of the time of this writing, there are just over 400,000 active installs from Google Play after having been released a mere 36 days ago. You can install Kodi for Android from the download link below.
You are also welcome to continue sideloading it from the Kodi downloads page.
In terms of Kodi for Android specific features, 4K, refreshrate switching, and HEVC playback are now available on devices with hardware that support those features including a number of Amlogic based devices and the NVIDIA Shield Android TV, though it should be noted that Android 5.0 and above is required to take advantage of these features.
Kodi 15.0 Features
Across platforms, Kodi itself has gained quite a lot of features. Some notable examples include:
• A new chapter selector window – Allows you to visually browse and select chapters from mkvs and other containers that support chapters.
• Adaptive seeking (aka Skip Steps) – The more times you press a button to seek in a period of time, the larger the jump forward or backward will be.
• Audio and Subtitle Lists – For content that includes multiple audio and subtitle choices, you can select from a full list of choices, rather than manually searching through a spinner.
• Language Add-ons and Expanded International Preferences – Now language translations aren’t dependent upon release, but get regularly updated to all users as the add-ons themselves update. Additionally, you now have total control over date, time, temperature and more displayed formats.
• Improved Add-on Manager – The add-on manager has now been reworked to help make finding the add-ons you are looking for easier.
Additional Improvements and Changes
Other improvements include:
- • ffmpeg 2.6.3 update
- • Improved Closed Captioning support in Live TV
- • Fixed music video queuing
- • Allow scanning of new sources and marking as watched during other library operations such as “update library”
- • Windows DXVA HEVC hardware decoding support if driver and hardware support exist
- And more. See release notes for RC2, RC1, Beta2 and Beta1 for a full list.
Changes from 14.2 to 15.0 include:
- • Minimal 10.7 Lion 64-bit required on Mac OSX
- • Minimal iOS 5.1 required and ATV2 support discontinued
- • Minimum Android 4.2 Jelly Bean MR1 required on Android
- • Ubuntu 12.04 support dropped in PPA
- • On Android the system now handles the volume instead of Kodi
- • Removed the need for root/SU on Android. Some hardware/firmware might not like that. Please contact your hardware supplier
- • Removal of Tuxbox support. Users of Enigma2 boxes can use the VUPlus PVR add-on
- • Removal of AFP filesystem support
- • Remove legacy code pre-Frodo 11.0
- • Vast amount of possible memory leaks, segfaults, crashes and minor issues have been fixed
- • General improvements regarding code stability and performance in all areas
- • General code clean-up in all areas to simplify adding future features
- And more. See release notes for RC2, RC1, Beta2 and Beta1 for a full list.
DirectX 11 upgrade (not included in 15.0)
Although this release post is all about the 15.0 version, mentioning the DX11 upgrade for Kodi 16 is very important. One of our developers afedchin took on this task and completely revised our DirectX 9 implementation and upgraded it to the more current standard of DirectX 11. Don’t worry if you still have an older card, we only use low level features so you don’t need to run to the shop for new gear. If you are having problems on Windows you can head to our forum where you can find the most recent build available which is currently based on our 15.0 release. We appreciate all the feedback we can get. Read more: here. Again this will not be part of our final 15.0 release, it will be in 16.0.
Kodi Protest Shirt
To celebrate the release of Kodi 15 “Isengard” (and because multiple people have requested it), we’ve decided to re-launch this campaign until the end of this month. We do not have plans to relaunch the campaign after that.
Download
To upgrade from any previous build, just install on top of your current version.
How to Contribute
If you use Kodi, we encourage you to report problems with it on our forum first and after – if asked – submit bugs on Trac (following this guide: How to submit a bug report). Do note that we need detailed information so we can investigate the issue. We also appreciate providing support in our Forums where you can and donating to the XBMC Foundation if you like. For a current FAQ on Kodi 15, visit our Isengard FAQ. You can of course also follow or help promote Kodi on any or all of our listed social networks.