The team behind the popular Kodi media center (which used to be known as XBMC) have released an early build of Kodi 15.
Kodi 15 alpha 1 includes some improvements and new features… but also drops support for some platforms.
Kodi will no longer work on devices running Android 4.1 or earlier and no longer supports Apple TV 2 devices. There are also no more official 32-bit builds available for OS X.
The good news for folks running Android 4.2 or later is that there’s now support for HEVC H.265 video playback on devices with some chipsets.
Other updates in Kodi 15 include more control over skipping forward or backward, support for external subtitles over UPnP, support for different sort orders when using different sort methods, and improved closed captioning support for live TV.
My early Intel iMac is crossing over into the functional-yet-obsolete relic zone: no Opera, no Chrome, no Safari, and now no XBMC/Kodi. It will complete the crossing when Firefox leaves us behind, possibly sooner rather than later…
I’m guessing because they say h.265 support is chipset dependant, its hardware-decoding only support? Im assuming x86 chips could handle software decoding if it exists.
I’ve got a Pentium G3258 running my HTPC with Kodi. I’m hoping the intel igpu will handle h.265 decoding, if not I’m sure the CPU is more than powerful enough to do software decoding.
Correct. Software decoding of h.265 has already been added as of v14.
Ah, I was not aware. I run version 14, maybe I’ll start converting some of my uncompressed video to h.265.