It’s official: XBMC is dead… well, the name is anyway. The developers behind the popular media center application have given their software a fresh coat of paint and a new name. Meet Kodi 14 Helix.
Kodi is a cross-platform application that turns your Windows, Mac, Linux, or Android device into a media-center with a full-screen user interface, support for a wide range of audio and video formats, plugins that let you stream content from online music, video, and photo services, and much more.
Among other things, the latest version adds software-decoding support for H.265 and VP9 video codecs, faster library scanning, an option to prevent automatic add-on updates, improved support for hardware-based video decoding on a growing number of chips used for android devices as well as support for 4K video playback on devices with Amlogic S802 processors.
Note that updating from XBMC to Kodi is kind of a one-way street. When you update the system will move your library and add-ons which can make reverting difficult unless you backup all of your settings before starting so that you can restore from that backup if you decide to uninstall Kodi and go back to XBMC 13.2 for some reason.
Well, not entirely dead 🙂 The foundation behind Kodi is still the “XBMC Foundation”, and there are no short term plans to change that.