Development never ceases on Kodi, and so we’re delighted to present the 3rd alpha for Kodi 16 with features and fixes galore.

Long Press

More and more hardware companies are coming out with remote controls with a very limited button set. In particular, all current Android TVs are lacking a dedicated context menu button altogether. To deal with this, we’ve taken a page from the touchscreen UX and added a long press feature to remote controls. Now, if you press and hold the OK/Enter button for a few seconds, you will pull up the context menu. In the future, long press may be extended for additional functionality. For a better view of what this means, see the following video.

Additional Fixes/Changes

Here’s a quick look at a few other notable fixes and features.

• Three finger touchpad mapping in iOS to make room for new tablet gestures which will be available in Alpha 4 to complement existing tablet gestures.

• Kodi now supports being compiled with Xcode 7

• The Kodi GUI now supports a new stereoscopic depth effect for users of Kodi on 3D TVs or VR headsets

• The Music Library and Files View for music have now been unified, similar to how video files and library are unified

• Extended support for browsing movies by country and through UPnP as well as user-ratings which we be added in future versions.

Needless to say, this is not the entire list of fixes and features for Alpha 3, but that list is quite long and tends to focus on under-the-hood items that are mostly of interest to other devs, skinners, and add-on writers. As these under-the-hood changes begin to work their way up to the user experience, we’ll do our best to detail them here.

Conclusion

Should you want to download and install this alpha (monthly) build please visit our download page.

* Official Kodi 16.0 alpha and development downloads

* Raspberry Pi versions can be found on the forum

Get involved

Getting involved is quite easy. Simply take the plunge and start using these 16.0 Jarvis builds. If you use these builds, we encourage you to report problems with these builds on our forum first and after that, if asked, submit bugs on Trac (following this guide: How to submit a bug report). Do note that we need detailed information so we can investigate the issue. We also appreciate providing support in our Forumswhere you can, or donate to the XBMC Foundation if you like. You can of course also follow or help promote Kodi on all available social networks. Read more on the get involved page.