Kodi Download

Kodi is an open source and free software which has been developed by the XBMC Foundation. The software is available for multiple OS and hardware platforms. Kodi allows people to play and view most of the streaming media smoothly. These media may include videos, podcasts, music etc. This also consists of all sorts of common digital media files from the network and local storage too.

Functionality

Some of the most common videos, image formats, playlists, audio files, slideshows, weather forecasts and third party plug-ins are supported by the software. It is to be noted that the software is network capable, but Kodi does not consist of its internal digital television tuner code for DVD/PVR recording and LIVE TV functionality. The software acts a unified PVR/DVD front end, along with an EPG television guide GUI interface. The source code of Kodi is distributed as an open source under the GNU_GPL (General Public License).

Features

Below mentioned is the list of features one can expect to find in this software.

• Plug-ins and Add-ons
• Add-ons manager
• Application launcher
• Web interfaces
• Live television with PVR/DVD front end
• Video, audio and pictures playback and handling
• Themes and skin
• Web scrapers and metadata extraction

Support and Compatibility

The list of supported formats of this software has been provided below.

• Audio formats
• Video formats
• Container formats
• Metadata tags
• Network protocol servers
• Network protocol clients
• Physical digital media
• Digital image/picture formats

Apart from these, it is to be mentioned that Kodi is compatible and available with operating systems such as Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Raspberry Pi, Android, iOS, and Kodibuntu.

Advantages

Here are some of the benefits of Kodi which you may find interesting while using the software.

• It has a huge range of compatibility with various OS platforms and file formats
• The software is very much configurable.
• The open source nature is an added benefit.

Disadvantages

Go through the following points to know about the disadvantages of using this software.

• The software’s own internal audio players and cross-platform video cannot play any video or audio files that are encrypted/protected with DRM techs for the purpose of access control.
• So, this makes the user consider another media player which may support DRM or the DRM protection can also be removed from the file. However, this could bring in a bit of hassle too.

Summary

Kodi is basically a non-profit and free software forum driven open source program that is developed by the volunteers during their free time. They do not have any monetary gain from this software development. This software application’s core is programmed in C++. It also uses OpenGL graphics rendering under Kodi for both Mac OS and Linux.

It is to be noted that Kodi for Windows uses the Direct 3D rendering and DirectX multimedia framework. Despite certain limitations of this software, Kodi has wide range of functionality and compatibility. For the sake of information, it is to be mentioned XBMC has won a Lifehacker Awards in the year 2014 for Best Media Player listed in their entertainment selection. XBMC has won 2 SourceForge 2006 Community Choice Awards as well.