The release candidate of Kodi 15 is available for testing. The Isengard release of Kodi (formally known as XBMC) is described by the Kodi developers as a “clean up” edition. You can now get Kodi via Google Play and install it on an Android device and you don’t have to worry about sideloading apps.

Here are some of the changes with this release (via kodi.tv):

• Minimal 10.7 Lion 64-bit required on Mac OSX

• Minimal iOS 5.1 required and no more ATV2

• Minimum Android 4.2 Jelly Bean MR1 required on Android

• Various improvements in PVR section. This includes skin support and new PVR add-ons

• Complete video database clean-up session on stored data (no data will be lost). This may take some time on first run

• ffmpeg 2.6.2 update which bring better codec compatibility and playback

• Improved CC (Closed Captions) support for Live TV

• Fix the queuing of music videos

• Improvement of FF/RW (fast-forward / rewinding) of videos

• Improved logic to make PVR, audio encoders and audio decoders optional

• Fix of grouping movie sets when navigating in smartplaylists

• External subtitles over UPnP can be enabled through the settings section

• Allow scanning of new sources and marking as watched during other library operations such as “update library”

• Allow different sort orders for different sort methods

• Skip steps (step forward & backwards) improvements for videos and music

• Add jump to first unwatched in TV section

• Fix subtitles showing on top of each other in certain cases

• Reworked add-on manager that should give a better overview

• Chapter selection window that shows thumbs on where to skip to in the video

• Easier to navigate audio and subtitle selection list

• Show progress for add-on repository update

• Addition of language add-ons which allow us to update the User-Interface text outside of regular Kodi releases

• Immediately fetch updates from repository after Kodi version upgrade to prevent delay in getting better compatible add-ons or skins

• Expansion of international options like time and date format, temperature and speed units.

• Improvement of installing new skins selection

• Upgrade included webserver which should fix issues with iOS or Android remotes loosing connections

• Fix season art scraping on newly added seasons

• On Android the system now handles the volume instead of Kodi

• Android HEVC H.265 support for some chipsets

• Refreshrate switching on Android 5.0 opr higher (your device must have the proper implementation of these features to support it)

• 4K@60Hz playback on the NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV

• Reworked the storage provider on Android. This fixes several problems with mounting points for storage.

• Remove default 250ms audio delay on Android for AMLogic chipsets. You may need to adjust the delay again

• Remove certain codecs from our core code and made add-ons out of them. So called Audio encoders/decoders

• Removed the need for root/SU on Android. Some hardware/firmware might not like that. Please contact your hardware supplier

• Removal of Tuxbox support. Users of Enigma2 boxes can use the VUPlus PVR add-on

• Removal of AFP filesystem support

• Remove legacy code pre-Frodo 11.0

• Vast amount of possible memory leaks, segfaults, crashes and minor issues have been fixed

• General improvements regarding code stability and performance in all areas

• General code clean-up in all areas to simplify adding future features

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