Kodi

Kodi media center, formerly known as XBMC Media Center, is an award-winning free and open source cross-platform software media player and entertainment hub for digital media for HTPCs (Home theater PCs). It uses a 10-foot user interface designed to be a media player for the living-room, using a remote control as the primary input device. Its graphical user interface (GUI) allows the user to easily browse and view videos, photos, podcasts, and music from a harddrive, optical disc, local network, and the internet using only a few buttons. The Kodi project is managed by the non-profit XBMC Foundation, and developed by volunteers located around the world. Since its creation in 2003 more than 500 software developers have contributed to Kodi, and around 60 developers on regular basis. Also 200-plus translators have worked to expand its reach, making it available in more than 72 languages.

Kodi (then called "Xbox Media Center") was originally created as a media center application for the first-generation Xbox game console (no longer supported) but is now officially available as a native application for Android, Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, and Windows operating systems, running on most common processor architectures.

Video demos
Check out this excellent introduction video by Lifehacker.com:


 * Additional video demos
 * Kodi beginners guide - an introduction and tour by Kodi.tv forum user fredphoesh

Overview of features
For additional information about specific add-ons, see Category:All add-ons.

Language support
Kodi includes full support for many different languages by default. Kodi's structure is such that if the language is not available, or not up-to-date, it can be made by signing up at Kodi Main Translation Project (Frodo), Currently the existing supported languages are Afrikaans, Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, American English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian.

Official versions of Kodi
Full featured versions of Kodi are available on a number of operating system platforms. Team Kodi strives to keep a consistent feature set and include the full Kodi experience for all versions, even those on low-powered devices.


 * Kodibuntu
 * KodiBuntu (formerly XBMCbuntu) is a free Ubuntu-based Linux distribution with Kodi for Linux already installed and pre-configured, providing a complete packaged media center software suite for all IA-32/x86-based personal computers. KodiBuntu is based on Lubuntu instead of Ubuntu Desktop.


 * Android
 * Kodi for Android is a full port of the complete Kodi application to Google's Android operating-system, was first announced and its source code released publicly on 13 June 2012. This is a full port of Kodi's C++ and C source code with all its dependencies to Android with a build-system that was designed to handle multiple processor architectures, like ARM, MIPS, and x86 with the Android NDK (Native Development Kit for Android) without using a single line of Java, and the Kodi.APK is running natively under Android as a Native Activity application.


 * iOS
 * Kodi for iOS, which is a full port of Kodi to Apple's iOS operating-system, was first announced and released publicly on 20 January 2011. It supports both 720p and 1080p hardware accelerated video decoding of H.264 videos, and is compatible several Apple's iDevices that uses Apple A4 or higher SoC processors with a jailbroken iOS operating-system.


 * Linux
 * Kodi for Linux is primarily developed for Ubuntu Linux. Third-party packages for most other Linux distributions are however available, and it is also possible to compile Kodi from scratch for any Linux distribution as long as the pre-required dependency libraries are installed first.


 * Mac
 * Kodi for Mac runs natively on Mac OS X with Intel processors with hardware video decoding for H.264.


 * Windows
 * Kodi for Windows runs natively on Windows Vista and higher. It is a 32-bit application but runs on 64-bit Windows and hardware as well, however it is not yet optimized for that architecture so there is no performance gain when running on 64-bit Windows. 1080p playback can be achieved on Windows based computers either via software decoding on the CPU if it's powerful enough, or by hardware accelerated video decoding.

Awards


In the SourceForge 2006 Community Choice Awards, XBMC won an award for Best Project for Gamers as well as an award Best Project for Multimedia.

In the SourceForge 2007 Community Choice Awards, XBMC was nominated finalist in six categories.

In the SourceForge 2008 Community Choice Awards, XBMC won an award for Best Project for Gamers.

In the Lifehacker Australia 2014 Community Choice Awards, XBMC won an award for Best Media Player. 

Programming and developing
Kodi is a non-profit and free software community driven open-source software project that is developed only by volunteers in their spare time without any monetary gain. The team of developers leading the development of Kodi, "Team Kodi", encourage anyone and everyone to submit their own source code patches for new features and functions, improve existing ones, or fix bugs to the Kodi project.

Kodi's source code for all its supported platforms is made publicly available by Team Kodi under the open source GNU General Public License Version 2 license. The group currently maintains a Git repository for this source code.