Kodi 16.0 Alpha 4 is released, Available PPA for Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus, Ubuntu 15.10 Willy Werewolf, Ubuntu 15.04 vivid Vervet, ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr (LTS), Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, Linux Mint 17 Qiana

Kodi (formerly XBMC Media Center) is an open source and very powerful project that provides all the necessary tools for transforming your regular PC into a bona fide HTPC, which if used in conjunction a big screen TV and a Hi-Fi audio system, will transform your living room into a veritable home theater.

Features at a glance

Key features include powerful media management capabilities, a fluid Interface, plug-ins that allow for great extensibility, cinematic effects and visualizations, built-in multimedia codecs, themes, and much more. The application can play your entire collection of music files, supporting all the popular formats like MP3, FLAC, WAV, WMA or OGG. It also provides support for cue sheets, audio tagging and smart playlists.

Your entire video collection can also be played by Kodi, supporting all the major video formats like AVI, MP4, DivX, XviD, DVD Video, MKV, and many more. In addition, it includes support for Internet streams. The program provides support for organizing and viewing your favorite TV shows, which will be sorted by episodes and seasons. Moreover, Kodi can be used to display an entire collection of digital photos.

Additional Fixes/Changes
Here’s a quick look at a few other notable fixes and features.

• Properly handle wired or bluetooth headsets on Android and only use PCM output
• Fix playback of VP9 and VC1 video codecs on Android
• Use best possible icons from other Android apps while browsing these in Kodi
• Enable true 1920×1080 output on AMLogic device without up-scaling
• Add Korean, Chinese and Chech keyboards
• Add multi-touch support for Linux platform
• Improve touch-screen keymapping
• Add stereoscopic depth for Confluence skin
• The item that you had previously chosen will now be selected in the selection list instead of just starting at the top of the list
• Decouple Kodi and system volume on Android which removes the double audio volume slider
• Karaoke support has been completely removed as it wasn’t functional
• Further improve DX11 implementation in Windows
• iOS9 support
• Various PVR fixes and improvements
• Various improvements to the music section

Needless to say, this is not the entire list of fixes and features for Alpha 4, but that list is quite long and tends to focus on under-the-hood items that are mostly of interest to other devs, skinners, and add-on writers. As these under-the-hood changes begin to work their way up to the user experience, we’ll do our best to detail them here.

How to Install Kodi 16.0 Alpha 4 on Ubuntu / Linux Mint via PPA

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/unstable

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install kodi

Upgrading
To update Kodi when a new version is released, just do a general system/package or use the following commands in the terminal (or via SSH):

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

Note: In some cases where additional packages are required, Kodi will fail to upgrade when using the upgrade commands as above. To install additional packages use the command below:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade