Monthly Archives: January 2015

Kodi from Debian

The well known XBMC Media Center has been renamed to Kodi with the 14.0 Helix release and following upstream’s decision the xbmc packages are renamed to kodi as well. Debian ships a slightly changed version of XBMC using the “XBMC from Debian” name and following that tradition ladies and gentlemen let me introduce you “Kodi from Debian”:

Kodi from Debian main screen

Kodi from Debian main screen

As of today Kodi from Debian uses the FFmpeg packages instead of the Libav ones which have been used by XBMC from Debian. The reason for the switch was upstream’s decision of dropping the Libav compatibility code and FFmpeg becoming available again packaged in Debian (thanks to Andreas Cadhalpun). It is worth noting that while upstream Kodi 14.0 downloads and builds FFmpeg 2.4.4 by default, Debian ships FFmpeg 2.5.1 already and FFmpeg under Kodi will be updated independently from Kodi thanks to the packaging mechanism.

The new kodi packages are uploaded to the NEW queue and are waiting for being accepted by the FTP Masters who are busy with preparing Jessie for the release (Many thanks to them for their hard work!), but in the meantime you can install kodi from https://people.debian.org/~rbalint/ppa/xbmc-ffmpeg/.

Happy recovery from the holidays! 🙂

update: I have updated the Kodi version to 14.2 in the xbmc-ffmpeg repository also updating FFmpeg to 2.6.1.
The packages can be used with Jessie, but unstable and experimental repositories also have to be enabled due to some dependencies missing from Jessie but present in unstable/experimental.

update 2: Dominique Dumont wrote a nice how-to about automounting optical media (CD/DVD) using Kodi on Debian.

update 3: Kodi is now available from jessie-backports, testing and unstable. Please use the packages from the official repositories instead of my temporary one which contains outdated packages and will be deleted.