The developers of popular, cross-platform media center Kodi have released version 16. While a lot improvements in the new version are technical, there are a few things you might notice.
For example, there’s better support for 4K displays if you’re using Kodi on an Android device. There are improved tools to let you stay up to date on recent actions, which could help with troubleshooting problems. And if you’re using a remote control with only a few buttons, now you can increase the amount of commands available thanks to support for long-press actions.
Kodi is designed to give you a full-screen user interface for interacting with music, movies, photos, and more. It can turn your PC into a home theater device. But you can also use Kodi to turn a media streamer like an Android TV box into a device for playing your local media and not just internet video.
The long-press feature lets you press-and-hold the OK or Enter button your remote to bring up a context menu. This makes it easy to do more things without connecting a keyboard or mouse.
Other updates in version 16 include a non-linear stretch mode that allows you to stretch 4:3 content to display on a 16:9 screen without warping the content on the center of the screen, a new event logger with a list of recent actions, an updated add-on manager, support for DirectX 11 on Windows systems, and there’s improved support for HEVC/H2.65 media decoding.
You can find more details at the Kodi blog and in the release notes.