Just over two weeks after the release of the fifth and final beta version of Kodi, now we have the first RC (Release Candidate) in our hands.
This means that Kodi developers are close to finishing building what will become the next version Kodi 18 Leia, which will be released before the end of the year.
As you can imagine A lot of work has been done on the latest major version of Kodi. According to a post on the Kodi blog, Kodi developers and volunteers have been working for two years on the Kodi 18 Leia release.
During that time, a ton of code was removed, replaced, modified, and many new features added.
For those who are still unaware of Kodi, I can tell you that this is a media center that can be used to play almost all popular audio and video formats.
With Media Center, Kodi also allows you to be able to play CDs and DVDs directly from the disk file or from an image, and it supports almost all popular multimedia file formats, it can even play files within ZIP and RAR files.
What's new in the Kodi 18 RC 1
Kodi 18 is the next big update two years in development which includes support for RetroPlayer games, support for Google Assistant, better support for Windows and UWP, better Live TV features, much better Wayland support, better stability and many other improvements.
These days, it is very common for content providers and owners to protect their content with encryption.
New DRM
With version 18, added the ability to play that content the way it was actually intended by the DRM system.
Depending on the hardware used and the license included, you can reproduce this content, which usually also comes with a signing service.
Although there are already several add-ons available in the program's repository that already use this feature, and shortly, this will make content providers offer their services as an official complement.
New appearance
As for what the user interface is small changes and improvements have been added. Some may not be noticeable, but should improve overall utility.
Every major version of Kodi brings changes to the user interface. That is why Kodi skin developers need to update them to make them compatible. Right now, we don't have many compatible skins.
Also, the configuration section has gone through some modifications as well. Therefore, it is highly recommended that you go through all the settings sections and adjust them to your liking.
To complete, at the bottom of the interface, there is a small extended description of what each configuration does.
Music and video enhancements
The music section has also gained a lot of improvement for those who care a lot about having a clean music library.
The characteristics of Live TV's Kodi and its recording front-end are one of the lesser-known resources, as it requires knowledge and settings to configure.
In order to use this, you will need some extra hardware, like a USB tuner or a network tuner, like the HDHomerun, to get the cable or ether signal converted into a video stream.
What has been done over time is to improve the usability and stability of this component and try to make it an optimal replacement for your normal out / ether decoder.
At the moment, there are no specific dates for Kodi 18 Leia. However, one thing is for sure: we are approaching that date. Kodi developers should release the second Release Candidate soon, which will be followed by the final version.
In case you want to try Kodi 18 RC1, you should visit the official download page. From there, choose your operating system and then choose the 'Preview' tab. This is where you will see Kodi 18 RC1 available for download.