Kodi 17 “Krypton” Alpha 2 Released

5 July 2016 Android iPad iPhone Zahid

Kodi, the massively popular open-source home theatre software, has just released a new alpha version. Nicknamed “Krypton” after the home planet of one of the greatest superhero the world has ever seen; this version will come with default touch-enabled interface skins, a dramatically improved video player experience as well as a focus on making live streams easier and better.

This release has had response from 39 different developers from around the world amassing a total of 3735 code commits via 1179 pull-requests. These statistics are huge for any open-source software iteration and just show the number of changes, improvements and refinements that have been made to the Kodi codebase for version 17.

The biggest and most talked about change is the redesign of the default skins. Both Estuary and Estouchy skins have been built entirely from the ground up to favour the new mediums and hardware Kodi now runs on. Estouchy has a touch-first design orientation to suit tablets, smartphones and touchscreens. Other default skins cater to remote-based interfaces such as Android TV whilst there have been significant refinements for pointer-based skins for those who wish to continue to run Kodi on their laptops and computers.

kodi v17 homescreen

There has also been a driven approach to the video player within Kodi. The majority of the interface for watching and streaming video content has been refactored to ensure it is no longer interwoven unnecessarily with other components in the platform.

kodi v17 themes

Those changes allow for a much more flexible and versatile experience that allows multiple instances of the video player to be invoked.

Any regular Kodi user will understand that there is far too much for the version 17 iteration to cover before Kodi will be well and truly above and beyond other premium options, however the most “mention worthy changes” compiled by the contributing developers is outlined below:

Kodi Krypton v17 most worthy changes

10bit/HEVC hardware enabled playback on Intel or NVIDIA GPU that have the capabilities
Refactor of scrapers
Fix possible high CPU usage with GUI rendering
Playback improvement on all platforms
Support for multiple external ratings and user rating from GUI and smart-playlists
Audio and subtitle filter added to smart-playlists
Use ffmpeg for loading certain types of images and drop external libraries
Added PVR to event log feature
Various database optimisation
Unify behaviour of context menu
Improvements on binary add-on handling
Rework of render capture which is used by boblight or ambilight implementations
Removes SAP streams support
Added MVC, frame pack and 3D switching support on Raspberry Pi
Change certain settings from spinners to a list
Further improvements on DirectX implementation
Further unify certain skin windows to make it easier to make new skins without duplicating same code
Music mood scanning
Game controller add-ons
Improved tag reading from music files
Improvement on Kodi rendering system which should cut CPU load and pave the way to headless some day
Add InProgress node for TV Shows
Fix CPU count on Android
Various changes to Kodi python API
Save skin settings on early exit which should fix problems with loosing settings after restart
Improved binary add-on API
Improvements to internal web server
Use number separators from the selected GUI langauge
Update to FFmpeg 3.0
Security and stability improvements all-round
Enable IPv6 for CURL