Free home theater software Kodi v17.0 now released, here’s what’s new

Kodi -- a hot favourite (and free) media management software -- has just been updated to a shiny new version. Codenamed ‘Krypton’, it is available for Windows, Android, MacOS and iOS. Among its numerous enhancements there are improvements to video playback, music library management, audio on Android and several bug fixes and stability improvements.

The most visible change is the a new skin called Estuary, which is specially designed to make for easier and more intuitive browsing of your media library elements with a layout and elements that stand out clearly when viewed from your couch. Based on this updated theme is another new one built specifically for touchscreen devices.

This new version has an all-new video processing engine that makes for better audio/video synchronization and decoding/encoding on all platforms. On the music front, large libraries should now be quicker to browse, with support with better tag scraping when adding new music.

Kodi 17.0 on Android devices now features such home theater standards as DTS-HD, DTS-X, Dolby TrueHD, and Dolby ATMOS passthrough on hardware that supports it. There’s also support for 4K video output and the ability to decode video based on new video compression standards such as HEVC, VC-1 / WMV 9, and VP9.

This version also marks the first to be available on the Windows Store, but it can also be directly downloaded from the Kodi website for all platforms including Linux, Raspberry Pi etc. Head over to www.kodi.tv to know more.