Media center software Kodi is one of the most popular open source platforms for streaming videos, TV shows, music and more. Though there’s a lot of controversy surrounding third-party add-ons, Kodi itself is a powerful tool for your favorite content. The current version recently released is Kodi 17.1, a minor upgrade from v17 Krypton.
Surprisingly, the alpha nightly builds of Kodi v18 “Leia” are already available to download.
Go to https://kodi.tv/download and select your platform, then click on Installer against the “Nightly” option. The “Release” option will download v17 Krypton to your device.
The Story of Kodi v18 “Leia”, and Where to See Possible Upcoming Features
Here’s the story of how the “Leia” version got its name, and some of the features that are being planned for the new software update.
The team behind Kodi – formerly XBMC – has a process for picking the name of every new version that comes out. That typically involves going through user suggestions, picking the top 5 or top 10 and then having a vote to decide the final name.
This year was different.
They still went through the suggestions process, but when it was time to vote, news broke of the death of Carrie Fisher, who played the role of the unforgettable Princess Leia in the Star Wars franchise. When the team dug deeper into the option of “Leia” for the name of the new version, they realized that 2017 was also the 40th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope.
And so, Kodi v18 came to be called Leia, a tribute to the late Carrie Fisher, but also a larger salute to Star Wars.
True to its name, Kodi is no less than maverick royalty itself. After starting out as a small-scale project that was highly ambitious for its time, Kodi is now a globally known brand of media center software that natively embraces nearly every major operating system in the world, including Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, tvOS and even the budget-friendly Raspberry Pi developer’s board.
Kodi 18 “Leia” is planned to look exactly like v17, but for a few minor layout changes and menu item tweaks. There’s not much of a change in terms of functionality, but there are some major features planned.
We don’t know how many of them will actually make it into the final release, but here’s what’s on the cards right now. The link to the changelog will take you to a Wiki page where you’ll see placeholders for the many features that are being planned right now. More will come, for sure.
Kodi v18 Leia changelog
As noted by the team:
keep in mind that a final non-alpha/beta v18 (Leia) release is still far far away into the future. As such, these new features/functions and API changes is a placeholder containing changes to the current Kodi mainline (the git master tree repository on GitHub). It is a very much a work in progress, this is only listing changes commited to the master branch after Jarvis branching, and many many many features/functions and API additions, alterations or removal are still subject to future change.
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