Oliver Haslam on January 15, 2019, 12:23 am

Kodi 18 RC5 Released For Download, Here Are The Details

Fans of the Kodi media center software rejoice, for it appears that v18, Leia, will be making its official, completed appearance soon after release candidate 5 was made available to testers recently.

According to the team working on the update, this will be the final release candidate before they “call it a wrap on v18.0.”

This release has been a long time in the making and has gone through many, many different testing phases, culminating in RC5’s release. The team did say that a final release wasn’t far away when RC4 went live, and it would seem that not show stopping issues have arisen since that time.

That isn’t to say that v18 RC5 doesn’t have plenty of changes in it, because it seems to have plenty of fixes for problems that people encountered when running previous versions.

A few of the more notable fixes include:

Correctly redact user/password in certain cases

Fix window transparency on Android that might cause grey bars on HDR playback

Prevent crash when resuming audiobook when there’s no chapter present

Fix crash&burn by ensuring that Abort of ScriptObserver waits for thread exit

Fix regression from RC4 regarding “don’t disable gui rendering when losing focus” on OSX

Workaround double switching of refreshrate because we currently cannot reliably distinguish between 25p and 50i or 29.97p and 60i on playback start

Fix missing All Albums item from music library

Revert change that cause sorting of ANSII characters in library (proper fix will have to be done in v19)

Fix crash on certain language characters when using PVR add-ons

Fix crash on Windows with DVD playback after change in ffmpeg

Fix compatibility with older MySQL databases

With this version now almost ready for prime time, we’d suggest it’s probably safe to go ahead and install RC5 if you’ve been patiently waiting for it to be ready in recent months. Otherwise, the full update should be ready soon, so waiting is absolutely an option. Hey, you’ve waited this long, right?

You can head over to kodi.tv/download to grab the latest release for your Android, Windows, Mac or even iOS device.