Kodi (software)

Kodi supports many common audio, video, and image formats, playlists, audio visualizations (FishBMC, Goom, Matrix, MilkDrop, Shadertoy), slideshows, weather forecast reporting, and third-party plugins. It is network-capable (internet and home network shares). Unlike other media center applications such as Windows Media Center, MediaPortal and MythTV, Kodi does not include its own internal digital TV-tuner code for Live TV or DVR/PVR recording functionality, as instead it acts as a unified DVR/PVR front-end with an EPG TV-Guide graphical user interface (GUI) interface which, via a common application programming interface (API), abstracts and supports multiple back-ends via PVR client add-ons from third parties, with those running either locally on the same machine or over the network. Some can also provide online movie trailer support. Kodi also functions as a game launcher on any operating system. The Xbox version of XBMC had the ability to launch console games, and homebrew applications such as emulators. Since the XBMC for Xbox version was never distributed, endorsed, or supported by Microsoft, it always required a modchip or softmod exploit to run on the Xbox game-console. AMLogic VPU, Freescale's i.MX6x series VPU, and Raspberry Pi's GPU MMAL. By taking advantage of such hardware-accelerated video decoding, Kodi can play back most videos on many inexpensive, low-performance systems, as long as they contain a supported VPU or GPU. ==Core features==

Live TV with EPG and PVR/DVR frontend The TV feature allows users to watch some TV broadcasts that may be transmitted by a digital terrestrial television, asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL), cable, or Internet streaming, depending on the chosen add-on. From version 12.0 (Frodo), Kodi has a native Live TV with EPG (Electronic Program Guide) and DVR (Digital Video Recorder) features with a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) frontend GUI, which enables video capture and playback to and from a hard disk drive with PVR Client Addons for most popular PVR backends (TV tuner card server). These addons can be installed separately as plugins in Kodi. The PVR backend can either be a DVR set-top box connected to the network or a PC with a digital video recorder software. This software can run on the same computer or on other computers on the same network. The PVR software can turn computers or other appliances into DVRs. The operating system can be Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, and Android devices. Several types of PVR Client Addons are available: • addons used for many PVR software and hardware such as Argus TV, DVBLogic DVBLink, DVBViewer, ForTheRecord, Tvheadend, MediaPortal, MythTV, NextPVR (formerly GB-PVR), VDR, or Windows Media Center • addons used for Enigma2-based DVR set-top boxes such as Dreambox, DBox2, and Vu+ • addons used for direct LAN connection to network-attached TV-Tuners such as HDHomeRun, PCTV Systems Broadway, VBox Home TV Gateway, and Njoy Digital AnySee N7 DVB-S2 Network-Tuner. • addons used for the Internet-based television providers FilmOn (FilmOn.TV Networks), and Stalker Middleware, • addons used for IPTV in general, e.g. the simple PVR client addon. Video playback Video Library The Video Library, one of the Kodi metadata databases, is a key feature of Kodi. It allows the organization of video content by information associated with the video files (e.g., movies and recorded TV shows) themselves. This information can be obtained in various ways, like through scrapers (e.g., web scraping sites like IMDb, TheMovieDB, TheTVDB), and nfo files. Automatically downloading and displaying movie posters and fan art backdrops as background wallpapers. Kodi even allows connecting to a centralized MariaDB or MySQL database for advanced users. The Library Mode view allows users to browse their video content by categories; Genre, Title, Year, Actors and Directors. The Games Manager, once integrated into Kodi, provides a unified games manager library and GUI front-end launcher with online metadata web scraping support for information about the games. It also introduces Game Addons as new type of addon with just-in-time emulator installation. Adding a Games Library for Game Metadata, exposing info (current level, number of lives, number of coins earned, etc.) to GUI, as well as extending the Addon API to support Game Client Addons, supporting Kodi's VFS (Virtual File System). It also provides a joystick and gamepad abstraction layer for common joystick API and input clients. RetroPlayer Also under development is the RetroPlayer video game console emulator (ROMs) interface, supporting the libretro API and emulator cores (from the RetroArch project, which is its reference front-end). Libretro itself is a modular multi-system game/emulator system designed to be fast, lightweight, and portable. RetroPlayer supports emulators for popular retro game consoles, including Atari 2600, Lynx, Jaguar, Nintendo Entertainment System, Super NES, Nintendo 64, Game Boy, PlayStation, Master System, Genesis, Sega CD, and Game Gear, plus multiple arcade video games via MAME and Final Burn Alpha, as well as ScummVM and MS-DOS based games. From version 18 Kodi supports a player core, Retroplayer, to play games using game emulator addons available for libretro. Audio, video, and pictures media formats Kodi can play media from CD/DVD media using an internal DVD-ROM drive. It can play media from an internal built-in hard disk drive and SMB/SAMBA/CIFS shares (Windows File-Sharing), NFS, or stream them over ReplayTV DVRs/PVRs, Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) or Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) shares, or stream iTunes-shares via Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP). Kodi can take advantage of a broadband Internet connection if available to stream Internet-video-streams like YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, and Veoh, and play Internet-radio-stations (such as Pandora Radio). Kodi includes the option to submit music usage statistics to Last.fm and Libre.fm. It has music/video-playlist features, picture/image-slideshow functions, an MP3+CDG karaoke function and many audio-visualizations and screensavers. Kodi can upscale/upconvert all standard-definition resolution videos and output them to 720p, 1080i, and 1080p high-definition resolutions. Under Microsoft Windows, Kodi supports Directsound and WASAPI; since WASAPI performs no mixing or resampling, it provides best audio quality. Format support Kodi can be used to play/view all common multimedia formats through its native clients and parsers. It can decode these audio and video formats in software or hardware, and optionally pass-through AC3/DTS audio, or encode to AC3 in real time from movies directly to S/PDIF digital output to an external audio-amplifier/receiver for decoding. Kodi/XBMC features, since version 10.0 (codename: "Dharma"), an Addons Framework architecture and an Addons Manager GUI client that connects to a decentralized digital distribution service platform that serves add-on apps and plug-ins which among other things provide online content to Kodi, the "Addons Manager" (or "Addons Browser") inside Kodi allows users to browse and download new addons directly from Kodi's GUI. Many of these online content sources deliver over-the-top content capable of high definition video and can use popular video streaming services as sources for the media content that is offered. Kodi has extensibility and integration with online sources for free and premium streaming content, and offers content from everything from commercial video to free educational programming, and media from individuals and small businesses. Not all content sources on add-ons are available in every country, however. Due to rights agreements, many content sources are geo-restricted to prevent users in outside countries from accessing content, although some have taken to bypassing the regional restrictions in order to unblock these sources, disregarding the usage rights. Plugins and scripts Kodi features an integrated Python Scripts interpreter for addon extensions, and WindowXML application framework (a XML-based widget toolkit engine for creating a GUI for apps and widgets) in a similar fashion to Apple macOS Dashboard Widgets and Microsoft Gadgets. Python widget scripts allow normal users to add new functionality to Kodi themselves, using Python scripting language. Current plugin scripts include functions like Internet-TV and movie-trailer browsers, cinemaguides, weather forecast, over-the-top content video streaming services like YouTube, BBC iPlayer, Hulu, Netflix, Veoh, MLB.tv, Music streaming services such as Pandora or Spotify, online picture sharing sites like Flickr, TV guides such as TVShow Time, e-mail clients, instant messaging, different timetables, home automation scripts to front-end control PVR software and hardware, P2P file-sharing downloaders (BitTorrent), IRC, also casual games such as Tetris. Like the majority of applications that originated from a 'homebrew' scene, modification and customization of the interface using skins is very popular among Kodi users and many skins and themes are available for users to install. The Kodi skinning engine's flexibility is also advantageous to third parties wanting to create derivative works, as it facilitates rebranding the environment and making deeper changes to the look and feel of the user interface. As of Kodi version 21, the official default skin for new installs is "Estuary", for typical home-theater usage. There was a default skin specifically for touchscreens, "Estouchy", whose development was discontinued in 2024. Users can also create their own skin (or simply modify an existing skin) and share it with others via public websites that are used for Kodi skin trading and development. Many such third-party skins exist that are well maintained by the community, and while some skins are originals with unique designs, most begin as a clone or an exact replica of other multimedia software interfaces, such as Apple Front Row, Windows Media Center Edition (MCE), MediaPortal, Wii Channel Menu (Xii), Xbox 360 interface, and others. In addition to skins and themes, users can create a themed package called a 'build'. Within this package homebrew developers are able to distribute a skin and multiple addons. The delivery mechanism used within the Kodi scene is called a wizard. Web Interfaces Web Interface addons for Kodi normally allow browsing a media library remotely, to handle music playlists from a computer instead of television. Others allow remotely controlling the navigation of Kodi like a remote for remote controlling of an installed and concurrently active Kodi session running on a computer if it runs on an internet tablet or similar device with a touch interface. Others act like a media manager to allow modifying metadata and artwork in Kodi's video and music libraries. Application launcher Kodi has a "My Programs" section which is meant to function as an application launcher for third-party software such as computer games and video game emulators, all from a GUI with thumbnail and different listings options. However, while this feature was fully functioning on the Xbox version of XBMC, it is still in its early stage on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows, thus requiring third-party launcher plugins to function properly. ==Mobile remotes and second screen apps==

There are many companion apps for mobile devices available for and associated with Kodi. Some of these mobile apps work as simple remote controls, while others function as more advanced second screen companion apps, offering additional information about what users are viewing or listening to on Kodi, such as metadata about movie actors and music artists, with links to other works available from those persons in their collection or online. "XBMC Remote for Android" and "XBMC Remote for iOS" are free and open source official apps for mobile devices released by Team-Kodi/Team-XBMC on Google Play for Android devices and the App Store for iOS Devices, such as iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. These applications act as a second screen and remote control solution which allows for fully browsing the media library and for remote controlling of an installed and concurrently active XBMC session running on a computer via the handheld touchscreen user interface of these device. Several third-party developers have also released multiple other unofficial Kodi remote control apps for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, Ubuntu Touch, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone devices. Some of these remote control apps are made specifically for controlling Kodi, while some universal remote control apps are capable of controlling many different media center and media player applications, and some of these third-party remote apps cost money while others are free. ==Official versions==

Due to the dated hardware of the first-generation Xbox game console that XBMC was designed for, and a desire to expand the project's end-user and developer-base, many official ports of XBMC, now Kodi, to computer operating-systems and hardware platforms have been created. Through the processing power of more recent computer hardware, Kodi can decode high-definition video up to and beyond 1080p resolutions, bypassing hardware limitations of the Xbox version of XBMC. In recent releases of Kodi there is hardware accelerated video decoding for DXVA, VDPAU, VA-API GPU hardware video decoding, as well as hardware accelerated video decoding via ARM NEON, and OpenMAX, Broadcom Crystal HD. The source code for Kodi is actively updated by developers in a public Git repository, which may contain features and functionality not yet incorporated into the most recent "stable" releases. Native applications Kodi for Linux (formerly XBMC for Linux) is primarily developed for Ubuntu Linux and Kodi's developers' own Kodibuntu (formerly XBMCbuntu). Third-party packages for most other Linux distributions are also available, and it is possible to compile Kodi from scratch for any Linux distribution, as long as the required dependency libraries are installed first. Hardware accelerated video decoding is achieved via the VDPAU API on Nvidia's GPUs, the VAAPI API for AMD/ATI Radeon, S3 Graphics, and Intel's newer Integrated Graphics Processors, as well as hardware accelerated video decoding via OpenMAX, ARM NEON, and Broadcom Crystal HD on systems with supporting hardware. In late 2017 MacWorld UK described how to install on iOS devices before iOS 11 without jailbreak. Kodi for Android (formerly XBMC for Android) is a full port of the complete Kodi/XBMC application to Google's Android operating system, officially compatible with Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and later versions supporting API Level 14. It was first announced and its source code released publicly on 13 June 2012. This is a full port of Kodi's 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 XBMC.APK is running natively under Android as a NativeActivity application. Hardware accelerated video decoding on Android is currently only officially available for some specific hardware platforms, such as the Amlogic SoC based Pivos XIOS series which have been used as the reference hardware platform during the development so far. Kodi source code must be compiled with Google's official Android NDK revision 10d or later, and be built for the android-17 toolchain (Android API Level 17) using GCC version 4.8, which Kodi for Android code currently requires to compile correctly but is not supported by Google's Android NDK. This is also the real reason why Kodi for Android does not support the original Google TV; since the Android NDK was not made available for older Google TV devices, it means that Kodi could not be compiled for it today. Xbox (first-generation) XBMC 9.04 (codename: Babylon) point-release version of XBMC for Xbox, now obsolete, was released on 6 May 2009 as the last official version of XBMC for Xbox. The original developers of XBMC have since issued a statement stating they will no longer develop or support XBMC for Xbox as part of the XBMC project as of 27 May 2010. The development of XBMC for Xbox ended because the focus for all Team XBMC developers has completely shifted to the Linux, Mac, and Windows versions of XBMC/Kodi instead. Even though the original XBMC project no longer develops or supports XBMC for the Xbox, an XBMC version for the Xbox is still available via the third-party developer spin-off project "XBMC4Xbox", who have completely taken over the development and support of XBMC for the original Xbox. ==Commercial systems==

The developers of Kodi (formerly XBMC) state that as long as the GPL licensing of the Kodi software is respected they would love Kodi to run on as many third-party hardware platforms and operating systems as possible, as "Powered by Kodi" (or "Powered by XBMC") branded devices and systems. They envision Kodi being pre-installed as a third-party software component that commercial and non-commercial ODMs and OEMs and systems integrator companies can use royalty-free on their own hardware, hardware such as set-top boxes from cable-TV companies, Blu-ray Disc and DVD players, game-consoles, or embedded computers and SoC (System-on-a-Chip) built into television sets for web-enabled TVs, and other entertainment devices for the living room entertainment system, home cinema, or similar uses. Below is a list of third-party companies that sell hardware bundled with Kodi or XBMC software pre-installed, or sell uninstalled systems that specifically claim to be Kodi- or XBMC-compatible. Many of these third-party companies help submit bug fixes and new features back upstream to the original Kodi project. Computer hardware ARCTIC is a company based in Germany best known for their cooling solutions working in partnership with the OpenELEC team. On 5 February 2013, together they released a fully passively cooled entertainment system: the MC001 media centre (US and EU version), equipped with the latest XBMC 12 (OpenELEC 3.0) platform. OpenELEC and ARCTIC are planning on their next release, aim to provide a more dedicated builds for the ARCTIC MC001 media centre systems. AIRIS Telebision, sold by Telebision in Spain and designed specifically for the Spanish market, is a nettop based on Nvidia Ion chipset, pre-installed Ubuntu base with XBMC for Linux and a customized AEON skin and Spanish plugins. Other than the modified skin, what is unique with the AIRIS Telebision's XBMC build is that it comes with a digital distribution service platform that they call their "App Store" which lets users download new Spanish plugins and updates for existing plugins. Telebision also lets users download a Live CD version of their software as freeware, which lets users install their Telebision distribution on any Nvidia Ion based computer. Lucida TV II, made by LUCIDQ inc, is a nettop based on Nvidia Ion chipset which can be ordered with Xubuntu and XBMC software installed. Pulse-Eight Limited sells both custom and off-the-shelf hardware primarily designed for Kodi/XBMC, such as remote controls, HTPC systems and accessories, including a custom HTPC PVR set-top-box pre-installed with Kodi/XBMC that they call "PulseBox" Pulse-Eight also offers free performance tuned embedded versions of Kodi/XBMC that they call "Pulse" which is based on OpenELEC and a custom PVR-build of Kodi/XBMC that is meant to run on a dedicated HTPC system. Xtreamer Ultra and Xtreamer Ultra 2, manufactured by the South Korean company Unicorn Information Systems, are nettops based on Nvidia graphics and Intel Atom processors which come with OpenELEC and Kodi/XBMC software pre-installed. The first-generation Xtreamer Ultra uses Nvidia Ion chipset with a 1.80 GHz dual-core Intel Atom D525 CPU, while the Xtreamer Ultra 2 uses discrete GeForce GT 520M graphics with a 2.13 GHz dual-core Intel Atom D2700 CPU. Since 10 September 2010, ZOTAC has been shipping a software bundle that they call ZOTAC Boost XL with all their new motherboards and Mini-PCs, such as Zotac's ZBOX and MAG series of Nettops which Zotac also does demos of with XBMC. This ZOTAC Boost XL software bundle consist of the software applications; Auslogics BoostSpeed, Cooliris, Kylo (HDTV-optimized Web Browser), and XBMC Media Center. Zotac's ZBOX and MAG series of small mini-PCs are nettops based on Intel, AMD, or Nvidia graphics, and they are all sold in both as complete ready-to-use computer and as barebone computers (without memory and hard drive). Zotac Zbox ID33, ID34, ID81, ID80 and AD04 are all specifically marketed towards the HTPC market, with some coming with slot-loading Blu-ray Disc optical disc drive, and some with a remote control. The mintBox by the Linux Mint team is an OEM version of the Israeli company CompuLab's fit-PC, which comes pre-installed with the Linux Mint open source operating-system and software, MATE desktop, and XBMC. Available in two fanless models, both with AMD APUs, HDMI output port, eight USB slots, two eSATA ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, built-in Bluetooth, and an infrared media center application remote control. Dedicated devices PrismCube Ruby by Marusys is a DVB-S2 twin-tuner high-definition DVR-PVR set-top-box running XBMC as its main interface on-top of embedded Linux. The Little Black Box is a Linux kernel-based ARM media player with XBMC as its main interface. Marusys MS630S and MS850S are high-definition PVR-ready set-top-boxes with the ability to run Linux kernel-based media center applications like XBMC, and Marusys is advertising these two devices as compatible with XBMC. Myka ION is a fanless Nvidia Ion-based set-top device designed to bring Internet television and media stored on the home network to the living room; it comes pre-installed with XBMC Media Center, Boxee, and Hulu Desktop as applications that can be started from the main menu. The MK-X1 by Modified Konstructs is an Nvidia Ion-based set-top device based on Acer Aspire Revo that comes pre-loaded with XBMC, and the device has a recommended retail price of $300 (US). Neuros LINK made by Neuros Technology is an open Ubuntu-based set-top device and media extender designed to bring internet television and other video to the television, it comes pre-installed with XBMC Media Center. The Primus by Mediaimpact Technologies is a Linux Mint-based media center and set-top box. It uses applications such as MythTv, Netlflix, Hulu, and Steam, with Kodi serving as the central interface. The system is intended for living room enviornments and is distributed with a SMK-Link remote control. ==Derivatives and forks==

Kodi/XBMC media center source code have over the years become a popular software to fork and to use as an application framework platform for others to base their own media player or media center application on, as if Kodi were a GUI toolkit, windowing system, or window manager. And today at least Boxee, Plex, Tofu, MediaPortal, LibreELEC, OpenELEC, OSMC, GeeXboX, Voddler, DVDFab Media Player, and Horizon TV are all separate derivative products that are all openly known to at least initially have forked the graphical user interface (GUI) and media player part of their software from Kodi/XBMC's source code. Many of these third-party forks and derivative work of Kodi/XBMC are said to still assist with submitting bug fixes upstream and sometimes help getting new features backported to the original Kodi project so that others can utilize it as well, shared from one main source. For more information see the main "List of software based on Kodi and XBMC" article. Some examples on building on Kodi/XBMC are LibreELEC, OSMC, OpenELEC and GeeXboX which are free and open source embedded operating systems providing complete media center software suite that comes with a preconfigured version of Kodi/XBMC and DVR/PVR plugins. They are both designed to be extremely small and very fast booting embedded Linux-based distributions, primarily optimized to be booted from flash memory or a solid-state drive, and specifically targeted to a minimum set-top box hardware setup based on ARM SoC's or Intel x86 processor and graphics. Similar embedded Linux distributions to LibreELEC/OpenELEC/GeeXboX are the professionally made E2BMC and OpenPCTV which are commercial Kodi/XBMC-based software platform for DVR/PVR set-top boxes, with both being designed as a hybrid integration between the Kodi media center application and Dreambox's Enigma2 PVR software scripts. Another example is XBMC4Xbox, which is a third-party developer spin-off project of XBMC, with still active development and support of the Xbox platform. This project was created as a fork of XBMC as a separate project to continue having a version of XBMC for the Xbox hardware platform. It was not started by official members of the official XBMC project, nor will it be supported by the official Team Kodi in any way. It started when support for the Xbox branch was officially dropped by Team XBMC, which was announced on 27 May 2010. ==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. XBMC Foundation and the team of developers leading the development of Kodi/XBMC, "Team-Kodi"/"Team-XBMC", 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. The online user manual is wiki-based and community driven, and it also works as a basic developers' guide for getting a good overview of Kodi's architecture. However, as with most non-profit software projects, to delve deeper into programming, looking at the actual source code and the Doxygen formatted "code documentation" comments inside that code is needed. The Kodi GUI does require 3D hardware accelerated graphics (GPU) that support OpenGL ES, OpenGL, or EGL, or Direct3D with device drivers that support OpenGL ES 2.0, or OpenGL 1.3 or later with GLSL, or DirectX in order to render the GUI at an acceptable frame rate. Kodi is thus officially not yet available for MIPS upstream in mainline source code repository from Team-Kodi, nor does it as yet support DirectFB or DRI (Direct Rendering Infrastructure) rendering without OpenGL/GLES hardware accelerated graphics support. The combination of MIPS, DirectFB, and DRI is a popular architecture used today by simpler set-top boxes like digital broadcasting (cable/satellite) boxes and low-end digital media players, such as those based on MIPS architecture chipsets from Sigma Designs or Realtek. Kodi ports to MIPS is, however, currently being actively worked on by several independent development teams. Kodi for Linux supports toolchain building systems for embedded development such as Yocto, Buildroot (uClibc), and the Linaro set of Makefiles and patches for easing the generation of cross-compilation toolchains as well as the creation of a file system on embedded Linux systems across a wide range of hardware, kernel platforms, and CPU architectures (x86, x86-64, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, etc.). Python scripts as plugins and addons (widgets and gadgets) Kodi allows developers to create addons using a built-in Python interpreter and its own WindowXML application framework, which together form an XML-based widget toolkit for which they can extend the capability of Kodi by creating a GUI for widgets. Python widget scripts allow non-developers to themselves create new add-ons for Kodi, using Python. Application programming interface (API) Other than the application programming interfaces (APIs) available to third-party Python scripts and addon plugins, Kodi features several other APIs for controlling Kodi remotely or from an external application. These APIs includes a JSON-RPC server, D-Bus Server, Web server, UPnP AV media server (with UPnP MediaServer ControlPoint, UPnP MediaRenderer DCP, UPnP RenderingControl DCP, and UPnP Remote User Interface server), and a custom multi-protocol Event Server for remote controls. GUI-engine and skinning (themes) Kodi features a flexible graphical user interface GUI toolkit underpinned by a robust software framework. The application utilizes a specialized graphical design and layout library (named libGUI in Kodi), it provides a simple abstraction layer between the core application code and the interface. This architecture facilitates the development of dynamic layouts and complex animations while maintaining a simplified workflow for developers. Furthermore, Kodi supports extensive customization through its skins. The skin files are written in XAML, using a standard XML base, making theme-skinning and personal customization very accessible. ==Software limitations==

Kodi's own internal cross-platform video and audio players (DVDPlayer and PAPlayer) cannot officially play any audio or video files that are protected or encrypted with digital rights management (DRM) technologies for access control, meaning audio files purchased from online music stores such as iTunes Music Store, Audible.com, Windows Media Player Stores, and video files protected with Windows Media DRM or DivX proprietary DRM. Such files can be played only by using another media player supporting DRM, or by removing the DRM protection from the file. ==Reception==

Kodi won a Lifehacker Award in 2014 for "Best Media Player" in their entertainment selection. XBMC won two SourceForge 2006 Community Choice Awards. In the 2007 Community Choice Awards, XBMC was nominated finalist in six categories. Also in the 2008 Community Choice Awards, XBMC won an award for Best Project for Gamers. With Microsoft's decision to discontinue Windows Media Center (WMC) starting Windows 10, htpcBeginner.com voted Kodi not only as the best WMC alternative but also in many ways better than WMC. ==History==

On 13 December 2003, Xbox Media Player (XBMP) development stopped, by which time its successor, Xbox Media Center (XBMC), was ready for its debut, renamed as it was growing out of its 'player' name and into a 'center' for media playback. On 29 June 2004, the first stable release of XBMC was out, with the official release of Xbox Media Center 1.0.0. This announcement also encouraged everyone using XBMP or XBMC Beta release to update, as all support for those previous versions would be dropped, and they would only support version 1.0.0. Not featured in XBMP, the addition of embedded Python was given the ability to draw interface elements in the GUI, and allowed user and community generated scripts to be executed within the XBMC environment. On 27 May 2010, the team behind XBMC announced the splitting of the Xbox branch into a new project; "XBMC4Xbox" which will continue the development and support of XBMC for the old Xbox hardware platform as a separate project, with the original XBMC project no longer offering any support for the Xbox. On 2 January 2011, XBMC moved the source code repository from subversion to git, hosted at GitHub. Development on the Git codebase is continuing and the versioning scheme has been changed to reflect the release year and month, e.g., 8.10, 9.04, 9.11, 10.05. On 1 August 2014, an announcement was made of release 14 and name change to Kodi. On 19 February 2021, version 19 of Kodi is released. == Organization and licensing ==

The XBMC Foundation is the organization behind the Kodi and XBMC projects. It is legally represented by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), which assists the Kodi/XBMC project and its developers in legal matters such as intellectual property. It also assists with economic issues such as handling donations and sponsors that help the project with expenses for dedicated hosting service and activities such as going to developer conferences, trade fairs and computer expos to tech demo Kodi, meeting with potential new developers, and marketing the software. Kodi's source code is primarily licensed under GNU General Public Licenses, XBMC core is specifically released as "GPL-2.0-or-later", and is hosted through publicly available Git repositories. Add-ons, plug-ins and additional extensions such as skins that are released as official resources made by the Kodi project members are released under various free and open source licenses. ==Controversies==

Use for illegal streaming Third-party add-ons allow users to stream copyrighted content without the permission of its copyright holder. Some Kodi distributions and hardware devices, often marketed as "fully loaded", As of February 2019 the ban still appears to be in effect. In February 2016, the XBMC Foundation reiterated its stance on third-party Kodi products meant for the streaming of unlicensed content; Betzen explained that the reputation of the Kodi project had been hurt by its association with third-party products whose sellers "make a quick buck modifying Kodi, installing broken piracy add-ons, advertising that Kodi lets you watch free movies and TV, and then vanishing when the user buys the box and finds out that the add-on they were sold on was a crummy, constantly breaking mess." Betzen warned that although it is open source software, the name "Kodi" and its logos are registered trademarks of the XBMC Foundation, and that the foundation intended to strictly enforce its trademark rights to prevent their unauthorized use, especially in association with information and devices meant to enable access to unlicensed content. In March 2018, Google removed "Kodi" from its autocomplete search query, citing that the term was associated with copyright infringement, but failed to remove autocomplete terms for modified, piracy-focused versions of Kodi (that, unlike Kodi, are illegal). ==See also==