Kodi 18.0 Leia and a Whole New World of Possibilities
Kodi 18.0 Leia was officially released on Tuesday, January 29th. This upgrade had been underway for two years after 17.6 Krypton, releasing some test releases (RC) in the meantime. The date is not coincidental as on Saturday, February 2, the Kodi team will present the new version at FOSDEM 19 in Brussels. The presentation will be held by Martijn Kaijser, one of the most prominent members of the development team. Those who want to attend the event on Saturday at noon there will be Live Streaming on this link; here is also the direct link: https://stream.fosdem.org/h1309.m3u8
An interesting twitch is definitely K-18L., the “Mascot” introduced by the team for the new version, inspired by K-2SO.
What are the Pros of the New Version
One of the first things we noticed is Emulators support for Retro Games. If you enter Kodi Repository, under Games, you will see a list of Emulators ready to be installed. Along with Leia’s support on Joystick, keypads, and even Bluetooth, we see a new, developing trend here. So, there is the possibility that Kodi developers will want to add a sophisticated Retro Game console. We will try to elaborate more on this topic in a new article after spending a few (or several) hours of testing.
DRM (Digital Rights Management) content support is an interesting upgrade. This would allow for an External Audiovisual Platform within Kodi itself. We do not know whether this is how the development team is trying to tempt subscription services such as Netflix and HULU, in order for them to develop an official add-on for their Repository. The only remarkable subscription service we have seen in the official Kodi Repository is Eurosport Player.
In addition to that, we do not know how practical it will be to open a heavy program like Kodi for watching Netflix, once you have already installed it in your system as a subscriber.
Another major upgrade, at least for those who will install the new version on Android devices, is voice commands. Advanced Speach-to-Text mode, search with Google Assistant and voice commands will be satisfactory enough. We expect developers to add even more functionality to Voice controls in the near future.
Last but not least, the full support of iOS 10, 64-bit Windows Binaries, better Image Rendering as well as SD Card support on Android devices is worth giving it a try. The Kodi team promises that the sound will impress us while Blu-ray will be upgraded for improved user experience. We are looking forward to putting all these new features into practice as well as hearing your opinions and insights.
What’s Up with the Add-Ons?
Independent developers have had enough time to upgrade their add-ons for Kodi, through trial releases that have been around for quite some time now. There are of course incompatibilities with some addons but with the relevant upgrades, their creators have adapted them to work well with the new version 18 Leia.
If you want to upgrade from 17.6 Krypton to 18 Leia to Android device you have to do it through the Play Store if you have not activated an automatic update on your Android device. On any other device, please download the corresponding installation file here
As expected, the Greek “Kodi Builders” have already prepared the Greek builds for the new Kodi 18 Leia. You will find them available for download and installation on G.K.N. Wizard.
If you have a Kodi17.6 build installed by G.K.N. Wizard, you just have to go to the Builds category and install any of the available Kodi builds 18.0 Leia rather than 17.6 or 16.1.
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