Kodi 16.0 Alpha 3 released, Install on Ubuntu / Linux Mint via PPA

Install / update Kodi 16.0 Alpha 3 on Ubuntu 15.04 vivid Vervet, ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr (LTS), Ubuntu 13.10/13.04/12.04, Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, Linux Mint 17 Qiana via PPA

Kodi (formerly XBMC Media Center) is an open source and very powerful project that provides all the necessary tools for transforming your regular PC into a bona fide HTPC, which if used in conjunction a big screen TV and a Hi-Fi audio system, will transform your living room into a veritable home theater.

Features at a glance

Key features include powerful media management capabilities, a fluid Interface, plug-ins that allow for great extensibility, cinematic effects and visualizations, built-in multimedia codecs, themes, and much more. The application can play your entire collection of music files, supporting all the popular formats like MP3, FLAC, WAV, WMA or OGG. It also provides support for cue sheets, audio tagging and smart playlists.

Your entire video collection can also be played by Kodi, supporting all the major video formats like AVI, MP4, DivX, XviD, DVD Video, MKV, and many more. In addition, it includes support for Internet streams. The program provides support for organizing and viewing your favorite TV shows, which will be sorted by episodes and seasons. Moreover, Kodi can be used to display an entire collection of digital photos.

What New in version 16.0 Alpha 3

• More and more hardware companies are coming out with remote controls with a very limited button set. In particular, all current Android TVs are lacking a dedicated context menu button altogether. To deal with this, we’ve taken a page from the touchscreen UX and added a long press feature to remote controls. Now, if you press and hold the OK/Enter button for a few seconds, you will pull up the context menu. In the future, long press may be extended for additional functionality. For a better view of what this means, see the following video.
• Three finger touchpad mapping in iOS to make room for new tablet gestures which will be available in Alpha 4 to complement existing tablet gestures.
• Kodi now supports being compiled with Xcode 7
• The Kodi GUI now supports a new stereoscopic depth effect for users of Kodi on 3D TVs or VR headsets
• The Music Library and Files View for music have now been unified, similar to how video files and library are unified

Install / update Kodi 16.0 Alpha 3 on Ubuntu 15.04 vivid Vervet, ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr (LTS), Ubuntu 13.10/13.04/12.04, Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, Linux Mint 17 Qiana via PPA

To install a beta/unstable version of Kodi you must first add the unstable repository, then install XBMC. Use ppa:team-xbmc/xbmc-nightly for nightly builds and ppa:team-xbmc/unstable for beta builds.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/xbmc-nightly

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install kodi

Note that if you have any addons (such as PVR clients), these must be updated as well (they will not be updated automatically):

sudo apt-get install kodi-pvr-mythtv

1.1.3 Upgrading

To update Kodi when a new version is released, just do a general system/package or use the following commands in the terminal (or via SSH):

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

Note: In some cases where additional packages are required, Kodi will fail to upgrade when using the upgrade commands as above. To install additional packages use the command below:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade