We want you!
Since its first inception dating back to the original XBOX days, Kodi has been maintained by a group of volunteers. Over the years many volunteers have spent countless days (months really) on every aspect of what makes Kodi great. This consists of writing and maintaining the code base of Kodi, expanding to new platforms, maintaining the forum, wiki, website and download server and more.
We would welcome anyone who is willing to do their part on any improvement that is needed. A fair warning is that our codebase isn’t for the faint hearted as it’s quite massive and we are quite strict regarding code review before we merge anything. However don’t let this frighten you off as our current (or outside developers) will certainly give you pointers on improvements to get it included. What we currently need most are developers with knowledge of the following components to improve current implementations:
- Windows DirectX11 / audio / video
- Android NDK / audio / video
- iOS & OSX / audio / video
- General knowledge of C/C++ and willing to do some coding in areas of their interest.
Any bug fixes can be sent to our main github code repository for review straight away. If you are not sure or want to take on a bigger task or change feel free to open up a thread on our forum where you write down your proposal to get some initial feedback.
So why do we need you? Well the fact is that over the years the core team of Kodi has remained about the same size while the number of users went from a couple thousand to many, many millions while expanding from an XBOX only application to running on Linux, Windows, iOS, OSX, Raspberry Pi, and Android. Now the time has come to start calling out for some help.
To put it simply, we want to ensure that Kodi remains alive on all platforms while at the same time lowering the support burden each developer now faces. Each of the core developers has their own specialty and since Kodi is quite big you quickly run out of developers that know enough of certain sections. Add to that the changes needed for each operating system upgrade that happens and all the problems that arise with that. To put it in perspective we basically have only one developer for each section or even complete platform.
As already mentioned the entire team consists of volunteers which means everything is done in their spare time next to having an actual day time job and a personal life. This results in having only a few hours at most to spend on what they see as their hobby. Over the years the team consisted of many different developers who gave all they could but due to whatever reason had to change priorities which resulted in not spending time in Kodi anymore. What we are looking for are C/C++ developers who are willing to put in some of their spare time in maintaining and improving our core code. This can either be doing some minor bug fixes, reviewing existing pull requests for code contributions or even creating some of their own code refactoring or feature additions. It really doesn’t matter if you are just a student just starting out on C/C++ or are already a senior programmer.