Kodi 2024 (formerly XBMC) is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub that can be installed on Linux, OSX, Windows, iOS, and Android, featuring a 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls.

It allows users to play and view most videos, music, podcasts, and other digital media files from local and network storage media and the internet. Our forums and Wiki are bursting with knowledge and help for the new user right up to the application developer. We also have helpful Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Youtube pages.

Disclaimer: Kodi does not provide any media itself. Users must provide their own content or manually point Kodi to third party online services. The Kodi project does not provide any support for bootleg video content.

Music

Kodi can play all your music including mp3, flac, wav and wma formats. It has cue sheet, tag reading support and smart playlists for ultimate control of your music collection.

Movies

Kodi can do Movies too! Supporting all the main video formats including streamable online media, Kodi can import, browse and play your Movie collection with ease.

TVShows

The TVShows library supports episode and season views with posters or banners, watched tags, show descriptions and actors. Great for keeping track of your progress.

Pictures

Import pictures into a library and browse the different views, start a slideshow, sort or filter them all using your remote control.

PVR

Kodi allows you to watch and record live TV all from the GUI interface. It works with a number of popular backends including MediaPortal, MythTV, NextPVR, Tvheadend and many more.

Add-Ons

The real power of Kodi comes from the vast selection of user created Add-ons that are available though our repositories. There are Add-Ons for popular web services, applications and scripts. See which ones are currently available: Add-ons

Skin

Kodi allows you to complete change the whole appearance of the GUI interface. Due to the highly customisable skinning engine you are almost able to change every aspect of it's looks and feel. By utilising different colours, images and menu structures you can create a stunning interface that matches your needs as a complete entertainment or information platform. See which ones are currently available: Skins

UPnP

With UPnP compatibility you can stream to and from any other Kodi instances and play to other UPnP compatible devices in your home with ease. Have one UPnP master device and use other Kodi instances as clients which automatic keeps you watched status and library up-to-date. You can also now import from uPnp sources to synchronize your data inside instances of Kodi.

Web Interfaces

Interact with Kodi using its JSON-RPC based remote interface. This brings loads of possibilities for remote controls, web browsers and 3rd party tools to take Kodi to the next level.

Remote Controls

With support for hundreds of remote controls, CEC-compatible TVs, or one of the new Smartphone and Tablet Apps, Kodi allows you to control your media your way.

What's New

Multiple Instances of Binary Add-ons

This allows Kodi to load multiple instances of a binary add-on. For example: TVHeadend users can now run more than one instance of the add-on to connect to multiple back-end TVHeadend servers, with individual settings like channel groups and hidden channels maintained per add-on instance. @AlwinEsch was the developer behind a lot of this, with support from @ksooo. Your favourite binary add-on may not support this capability yet, but we hope add-on developers introduce this into their projects soon.

AV1 Video Support

Several Kodi platforms now allow hardware decoding of AV1 media. The Inputstream API has been updated to support AV1 and this allows add-ons using inputsream.adaptive to play AV1 streams.

Subtitles Rework

Massive rework of the subtitle system was undertaken by @CastagnaIT making subtitle formats more consistent for development and maintenance, and enabling features that were previously not possible. Kodi now supports dynamic positioning of fonts, changing of border and background colours, subtitle positioning, improved multi-language support, and more. If you are a regular user of subtitles, jump on in and check it all out.

Game (libretro) Savestate Support

The GSOC 2020 project of @NikosSiak received some polishing touches before finally (!) being merged. With mentoring from @VelocityRa and @gusandrianos, and the assistance of @garbear, this has been a long time coming. This feature allows you to save game state at any time, even if games do not provide native savestate features themselves. Great for gamers, and times when you aren't watching Videos with Kodi ;)

Windows HDR Support

Full HDR support for the Windows Desktop platform has been implemented by @thexai along with many improvements throughout the Windows (DXVA/2) video pipeline. HDR is not available on non-Desktop, i.e. UWP Store (Xbox) versions. Improvements to allow more accurate ACES Filmic and HABLE tonemapping make even SDR video look better, and these capabilities are implemented for both UWP and Desktop versions of Kodi.

NFSv4 Support

Changes to allow NFSv4 support were implemented by @lrusak as previously we only supported NFSv3. There are some caveats with this (you must explicitly select either NFSv4 or NFSv3 for a source). Give it a try!

Context Menu Consistency

Improvements to right-click/long-press context menu handling were made by @ksooo in numerous areas. This makes the function of the context menu much more consistent over different windows, and enabled some new capabilities like the playback of albums directly from widgets, series resume, etc. to be added.

Behind The Scenes

The majority of changes are "under the hood" and invisible to users but improve the stability, performance, and safety of Kodi. API changes have been made to evolve Python and Binary add-ons and bring new skinning features. There are updates to Kodi dependencies on most if not all Kodi platforms. Fixes from regular use of code static-analysis tools. Database migration fixes for a smoother update ... and lots more.

There are too many individual changes to detail everything. If you would like to know more, please look back through the Nexus Alpha to RC2 release announcements and review the GitHub changelog here.

Time does not stand still. Branches are forked and development on Kodi v21 (codename: "Omega") is already underway. Thank you again for your continued support as we continue to make Kodi great!