After 7 beta versions and 4 release candidates, the final release version of Kodi 17, codenamed “Krypton,” is now available. You can download the Fire TV version here, but the easiest way to install the app is to use my Downloader app from the official Fire TV appstore and enter
This new version of Kodi now requires Fire OS 5, so those of you with updates blocked who have remained on Fire OS 3 must stick with Kodi 16.1 or upgrade the Fire TV’s operating system. The number of changes to Kodi 17 from the last version is massive. If you want, you can look at the detailed changelog, but one of the most notable changes is an all new default theme. A change that affects Fire TV 2 owners is the new support for 4K playback, which was first introduced by MrMC and later adopted by SPMC. Once you’ve taken the new version for a spin, I’d love to hear in the comments below what new features or improvements impress you the most.
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I tried Krypton on my Fire TV today. Still not stable IMHO with some addons not working properly or not at all.
I’ve also found video freezes for between 2-5 seconds.
I wasn’t impressed with the beta versions and while there are some good tweaks and Estuary is a good skin, it’s still not ready for release for Android and Windows users.
Back to SBMC for me.
SPMC**
i’ve been using krypton rc 3. I like it but i will say. video playback of local content on Kodi is really poor. I’m stunned by that. I have a WDTV Live released in 2009. In terms of actually playing the files it is a better player than kodi on a more powerful firestick. It ffw, rewinds, pauses resumes, handles subtitles. It will play virtually anything except h265 which i’m just starting to rip things too. But under kodi i get tons of stuttering video, freezes and audio syncing issues. The freezing and stuttering is maddening. The ffwing is just cumbersome and doesn’t seem to be very precise. It often skips past what is on the screen. It’s not that it can’t play videos. If you never have to stop or pause it it’s fine. But i always have to pause, rewind, etc.
Used to use a WDTV Live and a WDTV Live Hub. I then passed them on to my mother (the Live one died a month back, now she’s on the Hub). Indeed I can attest they were more reliable when it came to playback – you really knew you’d have no issues. I guess they were much more optimised…
yeah they suck at networking though. Once you get them to recognize your shares you pretty much need to not muck around with anything. Like don’t change shares, disconnect your ethernet, lol. It may just randomly stop seeing things. But if you do nothing it tends to know where to look. But yeah it’s really stunning. my Live is still going strong and it’s amazing. In terms of simply playing my own video files it’s rarely even hiccups. Kodi is just temperamental. As for being optimized i’m not knowledgable about such things but i always wonder why VLC or Media Player Classic seem to have such good performance while players on boxes seem to struggle.
Thanks! Staying put on Jarvis.
Staying on Jarvis, too. I imagine it will be a while for the add-ons (both legal and otherwise) to catch up on compatibility with Krypton.
Same here go Jarvis go !
Since the first 3 comments have been negative I guess I will post that I have been running 17 since RC 1 (2 really there was an issue with 1 and it was pulled) and all is fine – I like it. Been happy for months now.
The MAIN Thing I had to do was turn OFF hardware acceleration. That really made all the difference. When skipping ahead previously with it on it would just lose itself for seconds(felt like minutes sometimes).
I will install this 17.0 release but since RC 2,3 and 4 were fine for me I expect all will go well.
I do use a rooted FTV2 running the latest version with the new UI Version 5.2.4.0 (Build 565189620).
(thank you rbox)
I have been hooked on a Kodi skin that looks like old FTV UI.
From Hitcher (UK) with Sualfred’s mods. “fTV Fred Edition – with full working and integrated LiveTV part”
Not sure if any of that makes my 17.0 experience different (or better).
One word of warning, it can be difficult to move backwards in Kodi versions (can be done but you may have to work at it) – just saying, nobody’s life needs to be more complicated.
Good reminder to backup the configuration. Makes everything easier.
Can you provide the link to Root a ftv2 with the latest fire os 5.2.4?
Btw it is difficult to downgrade from kodi 17 to 16.1?
THANKS.
which hardware acceleration? first or second or both? I tried both but my videos seem to stutter no matter what.
Total New Look. Tried some of the new builds. My favorite is “Kodiflix”. Literally is the the Netflix layout. Still unstable with a few glitches however.
Weird. Kodi’s blog page listens RC4 as the current release.
This caught me out also. Went to check latest version about 2-3 days ago, saw rc4 and didn’t even notice final was in downloads section.
Apparently it’s because the Android build requires less tweaking while other platforms require more attention.
This is why the apk is ready before the announcement was posted.
I think I will stick to my SPMC/MR MC combo for now.
I would not recommend going to this release if you do bitstreaming to a receiver. Apparently the devs believe they can help to reign in versioning on Android and setup Krypton so that you can only bitstream if your product maker advances the firmware to Android API v23 (Android 6.0). This means that AFTV cannot bitstream as OS 5 is based off of Android 5.1.
Hopefully the ftv hardware built-in to the partner oem tvs will see a jump to a more current Android version.
3 – 5 – 7? Could that be too much to hope for?
[Also what would we call a firetv tv?]
Just Fire Tv or Fire TV Stick also?
It’s a free third party app, load it wherever you want.
It works on any Android device you can install it on. [To say nothing of the various other platforms.]
Iam still stay on kodi version16, just like some people said above some add on still don’t compatible with kodi version 17 yet, alots of programs add on still do not work
My Kodi 17 works fine for fire stick and win10 but no real Pandora addon for win10. Yes, there is pointer addon for fire os. I miss the win10 independent pandora music addon! Pandora works easier with a remote with the old win10 addon on my HTPC
I’ll stick to 16. the upgrade process on kodi isn’t usually very good. if it told you what apps wouldn’t work at the start and gave you the choice to disable them or abort that would be good.
however, it’s not that sophisticated and doesn’t usually give any noticeable enhancements worth the hassle of upgrade for me.
This german blog article says Kodi can now output DTS-HD and DolbyTrueHD on Nvidia Shield. Is there any chance that this feature was/will be ported to FireTVs too? I guess this might depend on the FTVs hardware implementation of HDMI and also amazons android drivers? Also does Kodi 17 now support frame rate switching on the firetvs?
https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Mediacenter-Software-Kodi-17-0-Neue-aufgeraeumte-Oberflaechen-neue-Funktionen-3616999.html
Quick question: I’m testing Kodi 17, but can’t find where the “show hidden files” setting is. Anyone???
I tried it and went back to Jarvis as it doesn’t support DTS-HD over optical to My receiver. Forgot to backup settings though so had to do a clean install of 16.1. Like the new interface and speed. Will use it on my stick. Windows 10 version seems to lock up a lot at the moment and not supported on my fire HDX either so that will stay on Jarvis.
Optical doesnt support HD sound no matter what, you need and HDMI for that. So it wasnt your kodi but your confguracion
Funny how one thing leads to another. Been on stable setup for a long time – aftv gen 1 running kodi 16.1 on pre-rooted fire os 3 series – 51.1.6.3.
I wanted to go to krypton becos the new look is very nice/fresh compared to Jarvis. To get there, I ended up needing to upgrade to fire os 5 series and also go to TWRP. Was a bit apprehensive becos of some horror stories on xda forums.
Anyhoo, it went well. Followed the instructions here and on xda closely and it went smoothly – big thanks to Elias and rbox!
Loving the new UI in krypton – so nice. So for those that are sitting on the fence, I would recommend upgrading.
Lastly, with so much new content available in HEVC, I have considered upgrading either aftv gen 2 or the xiaomi mibox. Leaning to mibox becos it is easier/cheaper to source in Australia – so frustrating that Amazon doesn’t ship most things to Australia.
So i finally went on and updated to Krypton.
New UI looks nice, BUT they complete destroyed audio support:
– No more DTS passthrough (this is intentional by kodi team – wtf, not a bug)
– No more AC3 passthrough for live streams = PVR (also intentional – wtf again)
– Bitstreaming PCM currently only supports 2 channel 48 khz output works (i could not get kodi to ouput multichannel pcm no matter which settings i chose)
– AC3 transcode option is not there at all (i wouldn’t use it anyways, but just to mention)
At least normal AC3 (Dolby DD) passthrough works, but for DTS, DTS-HD and DD-TrueHD there is currently no way to output multichannel audio at all.
All of this comes down to a decision of the Kodi Audio developers to no longer support workarounds they maintained for a whole lot of devices. Their goal is to force vendors to stick to the official android audio APIs, but I’m not sure if they’re not overestimating their power there…
Some more info on that along with a quite intense discussion:
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=289735
Apparently Amazons newer firmware versions also changed the way multichannel audio is to be handled by apps:
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=302043
So bottomline: I’m switching to SPMC, as koying is more likely to keep the old hacks as he’s not supporting that many devices and focuses on a few “key” ones (amongst which the firetv seems to be). Also he seems to be adding additional features (refresh rate) which will most likely not make their way into kodi builds.
Overall bad news for firetv owners i guess… :/
Yes the comments on this are quite funny and Fritsch just come off as an ass that apparently thinks he can fix Android fragmentation.
And he brags; they did all this without an Android developer and he doesn’t even own an Android box! I don’t think it’s the “Piracy Box Sellers” that are killing Kodi.
Tut. Come now. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! Fritsch and the rest of the Kodi team are doing a great job. Given my experience with devs on forums, I think they are doing great in the support department too. These people are being extremely patient with the user base. To interpret their workload management as an attempt to force the Android manufacturers to do one thing or another is stupidly combative. They are just trying to avoid maintaining a library of workarounds for devices they can’t even test, and if you put themselves in their shoes it should be obvious to you why they have to do that.
Just upgraded to Kodi 17 from version 14 —
I was reluctant to do so because I didn’t want to lose all my tweeks that I’ve made over time. One that I find to be VERY important was the keyboard.xml
it allows me to have a 30sec skip fwd/rev along with volume amplification using the AFTV D-Pad. I seemed to have lost that after the update to version 17.
Is there a way to get that back?
SmallStepBack
Stop
volampup
volampdown
Rewind
FastForward
CodecInfo
Stop
Hey guys, don’t forget if you’ve tweaked your caching in your advancedsettings.xml file–the caching tags have changed in Krypton, and the upgrade process will not change the tags for you. I’m still experimenting on my FireTV 1 so I can’t report results yet, but check out the description at http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Modify_the_video_cache.
I am very impressed.
I am running it on my nvidia shield and my fire devices. I used to run spmc as I always though it was the best choice… But I find this version far better performing.
Most notably on my gen 1 fire TV stick. It only has 500mb of ram..
I installed the 32bit version from the kodi website on the stick.
I am running s*** build with no lag whatso ever.
To be fair tho… My gen 1 stuck is fully debloated of all amazon stuff so runs a bit better than stock…
But side by side it out performs spmc on my stick.
Only flaw I have with kodi is the back button don’t stop video by default.. Spmc does.. Easily fixed with a custom keymap tho..
All in all I think kodi17 is pretty damn good
Tags have changed in advancedsettings.xml. Below is my new file.
1
157286400
10
Replaced with [ and ] so they show up.
[advancedsettings]
[network]
[buffermode]1[/buffermode]
[cachemembuffersize]157286400[/cachemembuffersize]
[readbufferfactor]10[/readbufferfactor]
[/network]
[/advancedsettings]
New tags for v17 Kryton
[advancedsettings]
[cache]
[buffermode]1[/buffermode]
[memorysize]157286400[/memorysize]
[readfactor]10[/readfactor]
[/cache]
[/advancedsettings]
Do we just change the bit.ly/kodi17app to bit.ly/kodi17.1app in order to upgrade to the 17.1 version? Or am I oversimplifying this? Thanks!
I have a rooted Fire tv 2 with amzn updates blocked, of course.
Where can I check the OS version?
Every method of apk install fails for every apk out there for FTV.
Even SPMC fails to install.