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.

What New in Kodi 15.0 RC1:

• Minimal 10.7 Lion 64-bit required on Mac OSX
• Minimal iOS 5.1 required and no more ATV2
• Minimum Android 4.2 Jelly Bean MR1 required on Android
• Various improvements in PVR section. This includes skin support and new PVR add-ons
• Complete video database clean-up session on stored data (no data will be lost). This may take some time on first run
• ffmpeg 2.6.2 update which bring better codec compatibility and playback
• Improved CC (Closed Captions) support for Live TV
• Fix the queuing of music videos
• Improvement of FF/RW (fast-forward / rewinding) of videos
• Improved logic to make PVR, audio encoders and audio decoders optional
• Fix of grouping movie sets when navigating in smartplaylists
• External subtitles over UPnP can be enabled through the settings section
• Allow scanning of new sources and marking as watched during other library operations such as “update library”
• Allow different sort orders for different sort methods
• Skip steps (step forward & backwards) improvements for videos and music
• Add jump to first unwatched in TV section
• Fix subtitles showing on top of each other in certain cases
• Reworked add-on manager that should give a better overview
• Chapter selection window that shows thumbs on where to skip to in the video
• Easier to navigate audio and subtitle selection list
• Show progress for add-on repository update
• Addition of language add-ons which allow us to update the User-Interface text outside of regular Kodi releases
• Immediately fetch updates from repository after Kodi version upgrade to prevent delay in getting better compatible add-ons or skins
• Expansion of international options like time and date format, temperature and speed units.
• Improvement of installing new skins selection
• Upgrade included webserver which should fix issues with iOS or Android remotes loosing connections
• Fix season art scraping on newly added seasons
• On Android the system now handles the volume instead of Kodi
• Android HEVC H.265 support for some chipsets
• Refreshrate switching on Android 5.0 opr higher (your device must have the proper implementation of these features to support it)
• 4K@60Hz playback on the NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV
• Reworked the storage provider on Android. This fixes several problems with mounting points for storage.
• Remove default 250ms audio delay on Android for AMLogic chipsets. You may need to adjust the delay again
• Remove certain codecs from our core code and made add-ons out of them. So called Audio encoders/decoders
• 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

How to Install Kodi 15.0 Isengard RC 1 on Ubuntu / Linux Mint / Elementary OS via PPA :

To Install Kodi 15.0 Isengard RC 1 on on Ubuntu 15.04 vivid Vervet, ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr (LTS), Ubuntu 13.10/13.04/12.04, Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela”, Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, Linux Mint 17 Qiana, Linux Mint 13 Maya, Pinguy OS 14.04, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya, Elementary OS 0.2 Luna, Peppermint Five, Deepin 2014, LXLE 14.04, Linux Lite 2.0, Linux Lite 2.2 and other Ubuntu derivative systems via PPA, open a new Terminal window and bash (get it?) in the following commands:

Use the command line terminal and enter the following commands. Follow the prompts as you would any other software installation.

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kodi

Installing PVR Addons
The Linux release of Kodi doesn’t include any PVR addons by default. To install a PVR addon, run the following command and replace the XXXXXX with the PVR addon of your choice:

sudo apt-get install kodi-pvr-XXXXXXX 

The source is available now. Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.