Kodi is a cross-platform media center application designed to make your media look good on a TV that’s 10 feet away. Plug your computer into you TV, fire up Kodi, and you get a remote control-friendly user interface for navigating your music, movies, photos, and online media, among other things.

But Kodi doesn’t offer just one user interface. The application supports add-ons and skins, so there are plenty of different ways to access your media. Since 2009, Kodi has used versions of Confluence as the default theme, but users can still install other themes.

Starting with Kodi 17, the default skins will be called Estuary and Estouchy. How can two skins be the default? Because one is for touchscreen displays and the other is for non-touch screens.

estuary

Confluence is still around. So if you install a nightly build of Kodi 17 today, you can still pick the skins of your choice. But for new installations, the first thing you’ll see will be Estuary or Estouchy.

Both new skins put a little more information on your home screen, including navigation options on the left and widgets which can display things like recently added content on the right.

estouchy

Estouchy is designed to run on tablets and other devices that have smaller screens, so while it has a similar look and feel to Estuary, the touch targets are larger and easier to hit with your fingers without accidentally tapping the wrong button, thumbnail photo, or menu option.

Want to use one of the default skins, but prefer a different color scheme? You can tweak the skin by changing the theme or colors.

You can find more details at the Kodi website… or just download the latest nightly of Kodi 17 and give the new skins are try for yourself.

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3 replies on “Kodi media center gets a new look with new default skins for Kodi 17”

  1. Kodi makes a dramatic visual leap! (To what Plex looked like five years ago)

      1. I feel that the debate there boils down to whether you want a central server DB (Plex) that has the ability to transcode for clients (which iPad needs help with) or configurable/customizable clients (Kodi) that can stream a massive amount of cloud stuff.

        I use plex for music, kodi for movies. Each tablet/Fire TV can have its own kodi setup that best suits its hardware.

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