The new version of Kodi «Leia» 18.4 is available and it replaces version 18.3 and it is that the Kodi developers seem to be following a schedule since the latest versions have been presented after two months.
For those unaware of Kodi you should know that it was previously known as XBMC, Kodi andIt is a free and open source software centero (GPL) award-winning to play videos, music, pictures, games and more. Allows users to play and view most videos, music, podcasts and other digital media files from local and network storage media and the internet, including TV shows, PVR and live TV.
This multimedia center has the customizable layout and the clean playback options. It also has plugins, skins, UPnP support, web interfaces, remote control support, and much more.
The Kodi project is managed by the non-profit XBMC Foundation and developed by volunteers located around the world.
Kodi runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, with a 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remotes.
Main news of Kodi 18.4
In this new version of Kodi 18.4, again, the developers mainly focus on bug fixes. This fixes the "Interface", "Playback / Screen", "PVR" and "Other" errors.
Firstly, Kodi has improved its interface fixing a missing text when ordering the addons and allowing to select the appropriate tab when going back through its menus.
On your skin, by default called Estuary has fixed the presentation mode when viewing the photos and the length of the text for the radio. Besides that en the video addons the episode and season format has been fixed.
Regarding the reproduction of multimedia content, Kodi 18.4 Leia has improved both playlists and smartlists and it has also improved FFmpeg to version 4.0.4, but this version still does not include the AV1 decoding that is already included in version 4.2.
A bug in slide shows was also fixed. There are also several bug fixes in the playback functions, including memory leaks. All detailed information about bug fixes can be found here on Github.
Kodi 18.4 Leia also includes a number of minor improvements:
- Be able to render with Direct X 11
- Resume playing a video in .TS format
- Fixed a memory leak
- Dolby TrueH sound passthrough is enabled
- Using absolute paths in combination with hosts in URLs
- Fix in file times for vfs plugins
- Repair + sign HTTP folder
- CircularCache File System Starts and Terminations
- Delete stream details when video information is updated
- Fixed built-in PlayMedia for playlists and smart playlists (music)
- Load the stream property program without using streaminfo (video)
- Fix AVD3D11VAContext frame initialization (Video, Windows)
- Fixed TS summary point related to PR16314 (video)
- Fixed memory leak, fixed segment violation (video, Linux)
- Fix PAPlayer handle transition to TrueHD (audio)
Kodi 19 Matrix in development
Finally, we also take the opportunity to mention that The developers also work in parallel on the development of Kodi 19.
In which new compilations appear almost every day "Nightly", that is, preliminary versions that experimental users can test. On the Kodi download page you can download these versions through the "Development versions" tab for almost all platforms.
How to install Kodi on Ubuntu and derivatives?
Kodi is distributed through installation packages from its official website, but in the case of Ubuntu we have an official repository which we can use to install this entertainment center on our computer.
For this we must open a terminal and execute the following commands.
First we must add the Kodi repository to the system:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
We notify the system that we have added a new repository:
sudo apt update
And finally we install the application with this command:
sudo apt install kodi