After almost two years since the publication of the last significant branch took place the release of the open media center kodi 20.0 , previously developed under the name XBMC. The media center provides an interface for viewing Live TV and managing the collection of photographs, films and music, supports television navigation, work with electronic television guide and organizing video schedules. Ready -made installation packages are available for linux , freeBSD , raspberry pi , Android , Windows, MacOS, Tvos and iOS. Project code spreads under the license gplv2+.
Initially, the project was aimed at creating an open multimedia player for the Xbox game console, but in the process of development it was transformed into a cross-platform media center working on modern software platforms. Of the interesting functions of Kodi, you can note the support of a wide range of multimedia file formats and hardware acceleration of video decoding; support of remote control; the ability to play files according to FTP/SFTP, SSH and WebDav; the possibility of remote control through the Web interface; the presence of a flexible plug -in system implemented in the Python language and available for installation through a special addition to additions; preparation of plugins for integration with popular Online services; The ability to load metadata (lyrics, covers, rating, etc.) for existing content. On the basis of Kodi, about a dozen commercial television sets and several open branches (Boxee, Geexbox, 9×9 Player, MediaPortal, Plex) are developing.
From the moment of past issue, more than 4600 changes have been made to the code base. The main innovations :
- The ability to load several copies of binary additions is implemented. For example, you can download several copies of additions
TVheadend for connecting with different servers, but using the uniform settings of the additions, such as channels and hidden channels. - Added support for hardware acceleration of video decoding in format av1 developed by the Alliance open media (AMEDIA), which presents such companies as Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, Intel, ARM, NVIDIA, IBM, Cisco, Amazon, Netflix, AMD, Videlan, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple CCN and Realtek. AV1 is positioned as a publicly available and not requiring payment for deductions by a free video coding format, which is noticeably ahead of H.264 and VP9 in terms of compression level. AV1 support is also added to the Inputstream API, which allows additions to use the Inputsream.adaptive interface to reproduce in additions of flows in AV1.
- The system of working with subtitles has been processed. The processing code of subtitles formats is modernized to simplify development and escort. Added the possibility of dynamic positioning of fonts, changes in the color of the background and the frame of the area with subtitles.