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Open Source Media Operating Systems Software Technology

Kodi 18 'Leia' 64-Bit For Windows Is Finally Ready To Replace the 32-bit Version (betanews.com) 80

BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: Earlier this year, we shared with you that a pre-release version of Kodi 18 "Leia" 64-bit for Windows was available. There was a big catch, however -- it was not up to par with its 32-bit brother. And so, many people just stuck with the 32-bit version, because, well... why not? It is finally time to make the jump to the 64-bit variant, however, as according to the Kodi team, it is now identical to the 32-bit version from a feature perspective. "The 64-bit Kodi version for Windows is now feature complete and on the same level as 32-bit. From now on the 32-bit installer will include a warning to ask you to install the 64-bit instead. This upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit version is seamless and you just need to install on top of the old version," says Kodi.
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Kodi 18 'Leia' 64-Bit For Windows Is Finally Ready To Replace the 32-bit Version

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  • WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Why the fuck does this link to some hearsay on a third party site? The only link needed is the link to the official announcement on the official Kodi site.

    Brian Fagioli really is a fagioli.

    • So that way Fagioli can lazily steal a paragraph or two from the third party site to use as a summary, instead of writing one himself. IMO, submissions that are all or mostly copied from another site should be banned. If it's important enough to you to submit, then write your own goddamn blurb.
      • Re:WTF? (Score:5, Informative)

        by RobotRunAmok ( 595286 ) on Friday December 29, 2017 @11:19AM (#55828189)
        It's actually even stupid-er than that. Fagioli is bylined on the original Betanews site. He is using slashdot to essentially link to/promote his own site. If you look at his submission history, he does this regularly. Hopefully, slashdot is compensated for this promotion, and is not just participating in this pseudo-journalism circle jerk out of laziness, but I am not hopeful...
  • by RobotRunAmok ( 595286 ) on Friday December 29, 2017 @09:14AM (#55827609)
    Editors: Could you not once during the lame summary have mentioned exactly what Kodi is? It's like slashdot is being written by one guy sitting at his high school lunch table for the other guys sitting at the same table.
    • by mjm1231 ( 751545 ) on Friday December 29, 2017 @09:59AM (#55827773)

      The linked article doesn't say what Kodi is either. Welcome to the future, where "news" apparently is only used to tell people things they already think they know.

    • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Friday December 29, 2017 @10:04AM (#55827799)

      I refuse to click read the article, or read any follow up comments to help gain context.

      I think it is some sort of Imaging editing software from Kodak.

      This is very common on Slashdot, unfortunately. Where some lesser known product gets some attention, and is posted about it like this product is known and used by everyone.

      For the most part as a rule of thumb, in order to not give a summary on what the product does...
      1. It will need to be 1st, 2nt, or 3rd most popular product in its class. (Windows, OS X, Linux) or (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime) or (Android, iOS, Windows (10 years ago we could had used WebOS or PalmOS))
      2. Explain what the product does if it belongs to a class that isn't available to consumers even if it the top used product.
      3. If Slashdot had articles which had explained it within the last 3 days, it is fine to use the name without explanation, otherwise rehash it.
      4. Assume a High School level of education and experience. Not to dumb it down, but after that point adults separate and specialize in things, so you can be talking about things that others have paid no attention too.
      5. Explain the product if the Acronym is similar or the same as a different products Acronym or Name. Eg. If there is a story about the Dodge Ram truck line, While people in the industry may just call it a Ram, on Slashdot it would be confused about RAM (Random Access Memory). So if the article covers how the Ram has been increasing in prices, we are thinking back to the day where RAM was expensive due to illegal actions from Memory maker Samsung.

      • Kodi probably meets condition 1. Either Kodi or Plex would be 1st and 2nd in their class, although I'm not sure anymore which would be considered 1 or 2. Anyway, Kodi is fairly well known in nerd culture; it's not some obscure little program no one has heard of before. It makes sense the submitter thought most readers would know what it is. He also linked to the kodi website, which should help the rest. Regardless, this site is geared toward the nerd/tech culture, not general audiences, so there's no ex
        • Ok, I googled it. A home theater solution. I guess I need to add an other condition. It needs to be a technology that is popular within 5 years.
          Home Theater software has been old-news for a long time. And Kodi wouldn't be high in this class. We have Apple TV, XBox and Chrome cast (in no particular order) as the top 3 in this.

          However for the most part Home Theater media software hadn't really gotten to much attention.

          • Kodi has been in the mainstream press a lot recently, because there are third-party add-ons that provide streaming from illegal sources and a bunch of providers have been selling 'Kodi Boxes' that have these preinstalled. Oh, and again because a few of these came with decidedly substandard power supplies that were a fire risk.

            It's been on Slashdot a bunch of times, including at least one article about when they had to change the name from XBMC over trademark issues.

            Basically, if you haven't come across

    • This. A thousand times this. The title and summary assume that EVERYONE a) uses Windoze and b) uses Kodi.

    • by Hal_Porter ( 817932 ) on Friday December 29, 2017 @10:36AM (#55827953)

      It used to be called XBMC, i.e. Xbox Media Centre, a media player. It seems like it does illegal streaming too

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      The original announcement for the 64 bit version says

      https://betanews.com/2017/06/0... [betanews.com]

      If you intend to use Kodi with add-ons to stream potentially illegal content, you may wish to consider a VPN.

      Or look at this

      https://www.engadget.com/2017/... [engadget.com]

      Apparently there are third party plugins which allow you to stream stuff for free, though the MPA/MPAA-led Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment etc are on the case.

  • What is the Kodi? (Score:5, Informative)

    by bigdavex ( 155746 ) on Friday December 29, 2017 @09:57AM (#55827769)

    Kodi wants to entertain you
    Kodi spawned from the love of media. It is an entertainment hub that brings all your digital media together into a beautiful and user friendly package. It is 100% free and open source, very customisable and runs on a wide variety of devices. It is supported by a dedicated team of volunteers and a huge community.

    Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub that can be installed on Linux, OSX, Windows, iOS and Android, featuring a 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls.

    It allows users to play and view most videos, music, podcasts, and other digital media files from local and network storage media and the internet. Our forums and Wiki are bursting with knowledge and help for the new user right up to the application developer.

    https://kodi.tv/ [kodi.tv]

    • Functionality? Buzzwords. VLC does all that for me, Media Player does too. What does Kodi actually do that makes vlc irrelevant?

      • It's more of a media manager. It tracks what you've watched already, can add in ratings of things in your media library so you can say get a view of media that you have that you haven't already watched and sorted by it's rotten tomatos or imdb rating so you watch the good stuff first. It also puts a pretty UI on top instead of picking movies from a file open dialog box or file explorer. It can add links to "extras" around the media, like a trailer, or cast interviews from YouTube, show links to other mov

      • by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) *

        Functionality? Buzzwords. VLC does all that for me, Media Player does too. What does Kodi actually do that makes vlc irrelevant?

        It fits on a Raspberry Pi that you can tuck away behind the living-room TV where no one will see it, which can then be controlled with a Playstation 3 Blu-ray remote (which connects over Bluetooth, so line-of-sight isn't needed) that has familiar media controls on it like "play," "pause," and "fast-forward", and a directional pad for selecting things. It's much more like a piece

  • I mean I get that eventually it would be caught up but they are trying to make it sound as if this is some monumental event that has a ton of advantages, while failing to list any. I can't really think of any. It's not like anyone is running a pure 64bit system and kodi is not resource intensive either cpu wise or memory wise. Why should anyone care if its 32 or 64.

    • by Mr307 ( 49185 )

      This was my first thought as well.

      Does this program whatever it is have a need for large memory use and why? After reading some comments (the summary was useless), it appears to be some kind of media library whatever thing so it probably does not demand a 64 bit version but some people still think its faster or better in some way.

      • by tepples ( 727027 )

        So long as a particular workload doesn't use pointer-heavy algorithms (which video decoding doesn't), the performance benefit of x86-64's additional general purpose registers is likely to outweigh the data cache hit of larger pointers.

        • by Mr307 ( 49185 )

          SIMD is a fair boost for applications that can use it as well. Many 32bit programs are faster than 64 due to a few reasons as noted.

          I suspect most people just see 64 vs 32 and think it must be mo gooderer in all cases.

  • Id like to subject the readers to an article that doesn't explain what they are talking about, or even why I should be excited. Well, more than one really, I have thousands of misspelled "articles" such as:

    Loapet 2 is out. It's differant from Loapet 1 in that it now has a 2 instead of a 1, and that is just amazing folks. How does slashdot think this will affect them in the future??

  • Who knows? Who cares?

  • I just checked the "kodi.tv" website, and for Windows 7, the 32-bit version is the ONLY one that is available!

Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. -- R. Drabek

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