Kodi Releases Its Official UWP App for the Xbox One

Kodi is releasing its first official UWP client for the Xbox One today. After bringing its desktop application to the Microsoft Store, the arrival of a true Universal Windows Platform application will give users access to the media player on the Xbox.

Developers of Kodi started planning the UWP version of their media player more than a year ago. In a blog post, one of the developers detailed the tedious process of porting their classic desktop code into the new UWP app while making sure support for third-party add-ons remains intact. It actually took months before the new UWP application started taking shape. “Around July 2017 the first faint life signs became visible of starting Kodi as a UWP application on regular Windows 10. From there on work slowly progressed on getting all bits and pieces into place getting Kodi grown up and getting it ready for the Xbox”, Kodi’s Martijn Kaijserintated on a blog post.

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

While Kodi on the Xbox One looks and works almost exactly like Kodi on any other platform, the functionality of it is a bit limited at the moment. The limitations are mostly due to the shortcomings of UWP, as some APIs are presumably missing from the platform, especially for the Xbox One where apps don’t necessarily have the same access to the core OS features like they would on the desktop.

“Network support is limited to only NFS:// shares. No access to the Blu-ray drive to start the disc or even an attached storage drive. There might still be problems with certain general python modules that are used by add-ons and we are finding and reporting them to the developers as testing progresses,” Kaijserintated noted.

Kodi for the Xbox One seems like a pretty good start, and it will hopefully continue to mature so that it reaches a point where the classic desktop app can be replaced by the true UWP client sometime in the near future. In the meantime, you can try the Kodi for Xbox One preview from the Microsoft Store here.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 16 comments

  • colin79666

    Premium Member
    29 December, 2017 - 11:11 am

    <p>XBMC comes home!</p><p><br></p><p>Shame it can't read SMB shares yet, without that it is pretty useless. Hopefully that will come soon as with the death of media extender there hasn't been an Xbox media solution really.</p>

    • evox81

      Premium Member
      29 December, 2017 - 11:49 pm

      <blockquote><a href="#232282"><em>In reply to colin79666:</em></a></blockquote><p>Plex has existed on the Xbox One (and 360) for a little over 3 years now. It was much more functional out of the box than this. However, although it is updated frequently, Windows/Xbox have been left out of some features (like Live TV) as of late, but it (along with HDHomeRun for TV) is where I jumped ship to after WMC and I haven't looked back. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent;">That said, Plex can incur a cost and I know it isn't directly comparable to Kodi.</span></p>

      • bsd107

        Premium Member
        30 December, 2017 - 3:03 am

        <blockquote><a href="#232919"><em>In reply to evox81:</em></a></blockquote><p>Doesn't Plex require all video to be transcoded to the single codec that it supports? That has been a big deterrent for me…</p>

        • evox81

          Premium Member
          02 January, 2018 - 9:55 am

          <blockquote><a href="#232949"><em>In reply to bsd107:</em></a></blockquote><p>No… it's kind of the exact opposite of that. To date I've never found a format that Plex server can't handle, but if you happen to have content in your library that one of your devices can't support, Plex will automatically transcode it to a format (in real time) the device can support. </p><p><br></p><p>For example, let's say you have MPEG2, H.264 and H.265 content in your library. If you play this content to a Windows 10 machine (with the appropriate hardward/extensions installed) all of it will play natively. But if you try to play some of that content on an older Roku that only supports H.264, it will automatically transcode the other two formats. It only transcodes the stream sent to the device, leaving your original files intact. </p>

      • flipside

        Premium Member
        31 December, 2017 - 9:11 am

        <blockquote><a href="#232919"><em>In reply to evox81:</em></a></blockquote><p>personally i use emby as it has a standalone client and a plugin for kodi so i can stream my own media and sync watched info etc across all devices, I think plex now do the same for kodi but its a recent addition</p>

        • bennymac

          Premium Member
          03 January, 2018 - 8:09 am

          <blockquote><a href="#233595"><em>In reply to flipside:</em></a></blockquote><p>Being using Emby for years now. It's fantastic.</p>

  • xapache

    29 December, 2017 - 12:01 pm

    <p>The versioning shows ALPHA release, so I'm holding my critique until they advance through the versioning.</p>

  • xapache

    29 December, 2017 - 12:02 pm

    <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent;">The versioning shows ALPHA release, so I'm holding my critique until they advance through the versioning. Geez, cut them a break after all. I think they released it just to show fans that they are actually working on it.</span></p>

  • dontbe evil

    31 December, 2017 - 6:40 am

    <p>Uwp support starts to pay off</p>

  • Mestiphal

    02 January, 2018 - 6:03 pm

    <p>Not Kodi's fault, but my computers decided not to see each other anymore. Even the Homegroup disappeared, and even if I remake it, it disappears again. So I got tired of reconfiguring the network every single time someone wanted to watch a movie off Kodi. Moved to Plex and all troubles are over</p>

  • markyyy

    15 March, 2018 - 5:51 am

    <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Kodi my favorite has now decided to launch Xbox one official update, that's totally awesome. For those who don't know You can watch plex now on Kodi using Kodi addons. You can also update to kodi's latest Krypton update which works perfectly fine and has awesome skins. I suggest you to </span><a href="https://crumbles.co/update-kodi/&quot; target="_blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">update kodi</a><a href="https://crumbles.co/update-kodi/&quot; target="_blank" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">.</a></p><p><br></p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC