Oliver Haslam on June 4, 2017, 4:14 am

Kodi 18 Alpha Download For Windows 64-bit Released, UWP Xbox One App Still Being Worked On

You can now download Kodi 18 alpha nightly for Windows 64-bit. Kodi team has also confirmed that UWP Xbox One app is still being worked on. Here are the details.

Big news for those who use Kodi on Windows-based hardware today, with the Kodi Foundation confirming that it not only has a 64-bit version of the ever popular media center software in the works but that it is also available to download as a preview build for those that just cannot wait to try it out.

The preview is Kodi v18 alpha nightly, and it represents the first fully 64-bit version of Kodi on the Windows platform. Kodi on macOS, iOS, Android and Linux are already fully up to speed as far as the 64-bit future goes, but Windows has proven a little bit of a stumbling block for Kodi so far, mainly according to the developer, because the roots of the software were actually in the original Xbox.

Since we originated on the XBOX we had a lot of legacy code related to Windows which wasn’t there for other platforms. Code was scattered everywhere and tied together in the most impossible ways. Slowly we started to clean up our build system and the core code that would make it possible to have a 64-bit version. Over time other platforms did add 64-bit support as the way we build them is totally different. Their main advantage point was how the external libraries that were used were build as it was almost as easy as just set compile to 64-bit. On Windows however we had to rely on the external library teams to provide such 64-bit versions and sadly almost none were available.

Thankfully though, after lots of hard work Kodi 18 represents an untangling of the legacy Xbox code that started all of this off, allowing the XBMC Foundation to get everything ready for the move to 64-bit proper. The team doesn’t seem to worried about the time it took to get here though, saying that “only the past year or two we have slowly been seeing benefits (of 64-bit on Windows) with all the new video formats coming out and the increased development support for FFmpeg which is at the core of our audio and video playback.

As for the UWP app which will also support Xbox One, Kodi team says that they are still working on it:

You might wonder where the UWP version is that a lot of you are longing for so they can run it on their XBOX One? All we can say is that it is being worked on and work is slowly progressing. Getting Kodi running as 64-bit is actually a big step towards UWP because it involved the same external libraries issue that needed to be solved and compiled. However on top of that we have to change or remove over 800 function calls that are not permitted or unavailable and those need to be solved for having a functional application.

You can download Kodi v18 alpha nightly build for Windows 64-bit from kodi.tv/download.