Kodi v17 “Krypton” Alpha 2 Was Released, Available For Ubuntu Derivatives

Kodi v17 “Krypton” Alpha 2 Has been released Today, How to Install on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus, Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf, 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, Linux Mint 13 Maya, Pinguy OS 14.04, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya, Elementary OS 0.2 Luna, Peppermint Five, Deepin 2014, LXLE 14.04 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's new in Kodi 17 Alpha 2

• 10bit/HEVC hardware enabled playback on INtel or NVIDIA GPU that have the capabilities (see hardware specs)
• Refactor of scrapers
• Fix possible high CPU usage with GUI rendering
• Playback improvement on all platforms
• Support for multiple external ratings and userrating from GUI and smartplaylists
• Audio and subtitle filter added to smartplaylists
• Use ffmpeg for loading certain types of images and drop external libraries
• Added PVR to eventlog feature
• Various database optimisations
• Unify behaviour of context menu
• Improvements on binary add-on handling
• Rework of rendercapture which is used by boblight or ambilight implementations
• Removes SAP streams support
• Added MVC, framepack and 3D switching support on Raspberri-Pi
• Change certain settings from spinners to a list
• Further improvements on DirectX implementation
• Further unify certain skin windows to make it easier to make new skins without duplicating same code
• Music mood scanning
• Game controller add-ons
• Improved tag reading from music files
• Improvement on Kodi rendering system which should reduce CPU load and pave the way to headless some day
• Add InProgress node for TV Shows
• Fix CPU count on Android
• Various changes to Kodi python API. Please check documentation
• Save skin settings on early exit which should fix problems with loosing settings after restart
• Improved binary add-on API
• Improvements to internal webserver
• Use number separators from the selected GUI language (example 1.000,4 / 1,000.4) and also apply this to ratings
• Update to FFmpeg 3.0 which brings improved playback, stability and security fixes
• Security and stability improvement by updating to: Python 2.7.12 / mDNSResponder to 625.41.2 / libxslt 1.1.29 / libmicrohttpd to 0.9.50 / gettext 0.19.8 / libzip 1.1.2 / libjpeg-turbo 1.4.2 / libpng 1.6.21 / lzo 2.09 / sqlite 3120200 / openssl 1.0.2h / taglib 1.11
• Enable IPv6 for CURL
• Added CMake building on all platforms. Still work in progress
• Switch to Visual Studio 2015 building
• Remove boost, CXimage, jpgIO, libsquish dependencies as they are obsolete
• Auto create code documentation with Doxygen including a to-do list (link: https://codedocs.xyz/xbmc/xbmc/)
• Moved old PyDocs of the Kodi API to Doxygen
• Added skinning API to Doxygen
• Removed dead and obsolete core code
• Fixed memory leaks
• Fixed possible code deadlocks
• Fixed possible security flaws
• Fixed possible crashes
• Fixed code flaws found by various analyses tools

Read more on The release announce

How to Install Kodi v17 “Krypton” Alpha 2 on Ubuntu and Linux Mint Derivative System :

To Install Kodi v17 “Krypton” Alpha 2 on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus, Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf, 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, Linux Mint 13 Maya, Pinguy OS 14.04, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya, Elementary OS 0.2 Luna, Peppermint Five, Deepin 2014, LXLE 14.04, Linux Lite 2.0, Linux Lite 2.2 and other Ubuntu derivative systems , open a new Terminal window and bash (get it?) in the following commands:

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common

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

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

1.3 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