The final version of this Kodi branch is close

May 1, 2015 19:04 GMT  ·  By

Kodi, a media player and entertainment hub that was named XBMC until a few months ago, has been upgraded to version 15.0 Beta 1 and is now ready for download and testing.

A stable version of Kodi is already out, which makes this one the second release with this name. The community is just getting used to the name, and the fact that the developers have pushed a ton of features already has helped a great deal when it comes to the name change.

"Here it is, the first beta build for Kodi 15.0; freshly baked and ready to be served! We could call Kodi 15.0 a 'clean-up' edition due to the lack of any prominent features and due to the massive spring cleaning we have been doing during the past months. Although some nice new features have been added, the majority of work was done cleaning up the vast complexity of code that was built up over the years," said the devs.

According to the changelog, the add-on manager now provides a much better overview, international options like time and date format, temperature and speed units have been expanded, Tuxbox has been removed, some pre-Frodo 11.0 legacy code has been cleared, AFP filesystem support is no longer available, and FFMpeg has been updated to version 2.6.2.

You can download Kodi 15.0 Beta 1 from Softpedia and give it a go. It's not a stable iteration, so please don't use it on a production machine.