Kodi v17 “Krypton” Beta 6 is Released, Available PPA For Ubuntu Flavours

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.

Fixes done in this Beta 6:

• Show select dialog for director button in the information panel if there’s more than one director
• Fix video stall on Android during skipping of video or when opening the player controls
• Fix potential memory leak in image handling
• Fix several problems in the cmake build system
• Redact username and password from the log if user has advancedsettings.xml
• Fix creating temp folder when handling add-on updates on Windows which fixes the problem from Beta 4
• Fix possible crash on handling certain fonts
• Fix possible EPG lock up
• Fix ASS subtitles on Windows
• Fix memory leak with ASS and certain regular subtitles on all platforms
• Revert change that broke RTL (right to left)  language subtitles
• Force re scan of music file tags to makes use of the newest available library structure
• Fix not updating the favourites menu item after changes had been made
• Add privacy policy screen in system information
• Remember last used subtitle service when searching again
• Fix hash checking in add-on installer which caused certain add-on not downloading when multiple repositories were installed
• Fix conversion of POPM music tag values to the new 0 to 10 rating
• Fix several issues to further improve controller support
• Update CEC library with additional fixes
• Fix some tag reading issues from music files

A full list of changes can be found here

What’s new?

Privacy policy
Your privacy is an important factor that the XBMC Foundation and Team Kodi considers in the development of all of our software and services. We are committed to being transparent and open. This Privacy Policy explains generally how we receive information about you, and what we do with that information once we have it. As such we have added this privacy policy to our website and also made it available from within Kodi itself to read.

WARNING:  This of course does not mean your privacy is totally protected. In the end you are still responsible yourself for whatever you install or share. For the official Kodi repository we have a set of strict rules in place for any add-on that is added or updated and strive towards protecting the users from any harm that might come from using them. However once you decide to install any other repository or add-ons from outside our official repository you must make sure you are informed of any consequences. Do not blindly install any add-on but make sure to read up on what it does and what it might share with others. If you are not sure then take the safe route and don’t install it.

You might want to read this: Be aware what additional add-ons you install

Force music tag re-scan
With Kodi v17 a lot has changed in regards to the music library and part of this has been better tag scanning and usage. For this to work to it’s full potential it’s mandatory for your music files to be re-scanned and the available tags to be extracted. After you upgrade and enter the music library a choice will be giving to re-scan now or later. As this re-scan can take up quite some time and resources you can answer NO and continue browsing your library. Once you exit library and re-enter you will be prompted again asking to re-scan. Once you answer YES Kodi will start scanning all your music files and extract the tag data they contain to a certain degree. As mentioned this process takes quite some time depending on the size. During this time Kodi might be somewhat slower than normal. Do note that this will not reset your library to a new state or that you will loose data. It will simply update what is available and will leave all play counts and the rest as they were.

Here is the full release announcement with an explanation of the changes made in this release.

How to Install Kodi v17 “Krypton” Beta 6 on Ubuntu / Linux Mint via PPA :

To Install Kodi v17 “Krypton” Beta 6 on Ubuntu 16.10 yakkety Yak, 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), Pinguy OS 14.04, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya and Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela, Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, Linux Mint 17 Qiana derivative system via PPA, open a new Terminal window and bash (get it?) in the following commands:

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

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