Kodi is an award-winning free and open-source software media player and digital media entertainment center. It allows users to play and view most streaming media, such as videos, music, podcasts, and videos from the Internet, as well as all common digital media files from local and network storage media, or TV gateway viewers. Kodi operates on the most popular CPU architectures and is available as a native program for Android, Linux, BSD, macOS, iOS, tvOS, and Windows operating systems.

Kodi is a non-profit project created in 2003 by a group of like-minded programmers, is run by the XBMC Foundation, is designed as a multi-platform home-theater PC (HTPC) application that has grown to become a multi-purpose technological convergence platform. With over 500 software developers and 100+ translators, it has been translated into over 70 languages. Kodi's beautiful interface and powerful skinning engine make it a natural companion for HTPCs, making it an ideal solution for home theaters with a remote control. It functions well as a standard media player application for computers.

Few things Kodi excels at

Music

Another important element of Kodi is the Music Library. You can add files to the library by just locating the location, from the sources or playlists. Nothing to worry about finding the right music for the right time. The music collection stores information in music file ID meta tags such as title, artist, album, release year, genre, and popularity. Album covers and fan art backgrounds are automatically downloaded and displayed as background wallpapers. Your music collection has never looked this good!

Video

The Video Library is a key feature of Kodi. You can add files to the library from a local hard drive or network-shared storage. It also can access any DVD-Video movies that are stored in ISO and IMG DVD-images or DVD-Video (IFO/VOB/BUP) images (even directly from uncompressed RAR and ZIP archives), from either local hard drive storage or network-share storage, also one relatively unusual feature of is the capability to on-the-fly pause and play. The library mode organizes video content by information related to video files, such as movies and TV shows. Users can access this information through scrapers and nfo files. The library mode also allows users to browse video content by genre, title, year, actors, and directors.

Digital picture/image display

Kodi uses the CxImage open-source library code to handle all standard digital picture/image formats, including panning/zooming and slideshows with the Ken Burns effect. XBMC (Xbox Media Center) can support CBZ (ZIP) and CBR (RAR) comic book archive files, allowing users to view/read, browse, and zoom the images of comic book pages without first uncompressing them.

Live TV & TV Shows

Use the app to watch live TV anytime you like, for free. Kodi offers a native Live TV with EPG and DVR features, along with a PVR frontend GUI. It allows video capture and playback to and from a hard disk drive, with PVR Client Addons for popular PVR backends. These add-ons can be installed separately as plugins in Kodi. Please note that you cannot use Kodi Live TV addons just anywhere in the world. Check your local jurisdictions whether you can legally stream online media content with Kodi.

There's more!

Kodi is the ultimate entertainment center software. It plays almost every kind of media you can find and it looks great while doing it! These are just a few more things that Kodi excels at,

Addons

Kodi allows third-party developers to create features that enhance Kodi with a plethora of add-ons. Developers create addons for audio and video streaming plugins for online sources, screensavers, skins and themes, visualizations, weather forecasts, web interfaces, web scrapers, widget scripts, and more. Also, there are more Plugins and scripts for Kodi, that will expand the feature of Kodi. Current plugin scripts include functions like Internet-TV and movie-trailer browsers, YouTube, Internet-radio-station, Flickr, instant messaging, P2P file-sharing downloaders (BitTorrent), IRC, also casual games.

Kodi supports many common audio, video, and image formats, playlists, audio visualizations, slideshows, weather forecast reporting, and third-party plugins. Kodi supports most comment file formats in the world, so don't worry. Kodi allows you to search video, and audio image files on local disk, network file system (NFS), Windows network (SMB), and Zerocof browser, and you can also add network location.

Kodi Foundation Remote Controls

Kodi supports hundreds of remote controllers, CEC-compatible TVs, and new Smartphone and Tablet Apps, allowing you to control your media the way you choose. We offer software-based remote controls for Android and iOS. Like Kodi™ itself, both official remotes are free and open-source software and may be found in the Kodi Downloads area.

Make Kodi better

The Kodi Foundation's products are for and built by users. There are no highly paid developers or low-wage support people waiting to accept your call. There are only users who have identified an issue and attempted to resolve it. This implies that the Kodi Foundation will always require the help of people like you. You can get involved to Make Kodi better,

• Coding - Developers can help the Kodi Foundation by adding new features, making our technology smaller and faster, and making development easier for others. Our code base consists of a variety of coding languages. Our add-ons mainly consist of Python and XML.

• Building an Add-on - Add-ons are what make Kodi the most extensible and customizable entertainment center available. Get started building an add-on, and learn more about the different ways you can contribute.

• Helping Users - Every day new people discover a Kodi Foundation product, and every day they are virtually guaranteed to have questions. If you are knowledgeable in a certain area in one of our products or simply want to try to help others, we highly encourage you to field questions in the forums.

• Helping with Translations - Get involved with Kodi Foundation by making Kodi, add-ons, and other projects available in your language. Our translation system wiki page has more detailed information.

• Performing Quality Assurance - Quality Assurance testing is one of the easiest ways to get started with one of our products and is a great way to get familiar with our code and tools. You can find more information on our wiki page.

• Writing Documentation - The Kodi Foundation wiki pages are the hub for information about Kodi Foundation technologies. Help make our documentation better by writing new content, correcting existing material, or translating content into new languages.

• Donating - We are always happy to receive a donation. Donations are typically used for travel to attend conferences, any necessary paperwork and legal fees, and the yearly Kodi Foundation Developers Conference, where a great deal of planning and coding for the following year occurs. Donations may also be used to purchase necessary hardware and licenses for developers, along with t-shirts, stickers, and other accessories for conferences.

• Buying Kodi Merch - Purchasing Kodi gear helps just as much as a donation, and you get something in return! Check out our store for Kodi-branded gear. We are regularly adding new products so check back often.

• Spreading the Word

Help us spread the word about how Kodi and other Kodi Foundation projects create a better entertainment experience. Share Kodi with the world by either one of the available social channels like Facebook or Twitter. Or simply tell your friends and family about it.

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