RetroPlayer Gaming Support Coming To Kodi 18, Mir Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Multimedia on 17 January 2017 at 09:19 AM EST. 6 Comments
MULTIMEDIA
While Kodi 17 "Krypton" hasn't even shipped yet, feature work is building already for Kodi 18 "Leia" and it sure should excite those wanting to play games from their HTPC.

Kodi 17.0 should be shipping soon while already the master code-base is building up feature work for what will become Kodi 18 later this year. We were tipped off this morning to this "inconspicuous fix", which actually isn't a fix but rather the introduction of RetroPlayer to Kodi.

Kodi/XBMC hasn't supported gaming within this HTPC software since they abandoned the Xbox game console as a supported platform. RetroPlayer support inside Kodi has been ongoing for about four years and with this merge provides "game client and emulator core support to Kodi via libretro."

The LibRetro cross-platform API is what's used by many game emulators for the PlayStation, Nintendo, etc. Among the emulators making use of LibRetro are RetroArch, RetroPie, Lakka, and Recalbox.

Not yet found in Kodi though is any games library to more easily organize your supported games for playing within Kodi, which will likely come later. Here's an old demo of RetroPlayer inside Kodi during its early development days:


Aside from RetroPlayer being integrated for Kodi 18, other feature work includes support for Ubuntu's Mir windowing system, VA-API on Mir support via DRM, and they have rid their build system of Autotools in favor of focusing on CMake.

Kodi 18 is looking like it should be an exciting release, but first Kodi 17 needs to see the light of day.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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