Kodi

Krypton has finally come out of Beta. There is a change of skin, Estuary, although you can change back to the skin used with Jarvis if you feel more comfortable using that easily enough.

It appears to be designed more for the consumer this time round, with user friendly options to find what you need.

Personally for video playback, it's still buggy with the video either frozen for 5 seconds or stutters, but then playbacks fine. I've found it handles proxy streams better than Jarvis, although the latter doesn't have the freezing issue.

You're able to go into the settings of the add-on while in it, where as before you'd have to come out and go into settings to access the config.

Think that depends on your platform and sources. I've been running LibreElec Krypton Betas on x86, Raspberry Pis and AMLogic S905 platforms, all playing either local H264, MPEG2 or VC-1, TV Headend DVB-T/T2/S/S2 streams or H264 streams from catch-up services (iPlayer, SVT Play, ZDF Mediathek etc.) and all seem pretty stable without the freezing etc.

I steer clear of the MacOS and Windows builds - LibreElec always seems better.

I've side loaded to the Amazon Fire TV which is working fine. As for Windows, I've gone back to a clean install of Jarvis because it's still too buggy. A shame as the PQ is better with Krypton.

Odd - no picture quality differences between Jarvis and Krypton on any of my platforms - same deinterlacing, same H264/VC-1/MPEG2 decode (it's all hardware pretty much) All my Blu-ray and DVD stuff plays pretty much identically.

AMLogic builds now do SD DVD .VOB hardware decode and de-interlacing properly so the software MPEG2 decode + YADIF 2x deinterlace in software workaround is now no longer required.

I've done comparisons using Krypton, Jarvis 16.1 and SBMC, the Jarvis fork. With 720p streams, it's a lot more detailed, while SD streams are sharper. Jarvis on both the PC and Fire TV are not as sharp.

Odd - I wonder if it is using different streams - I know Krypton has added support for newer streaming standards which may allow for this.

On local content played as files from my network storage and for Live TV I've not noticed any changes on the three platforms I use : Raspberry Pi, ODroid S905 and Intel x86 - all running LibreElec. (I avoid Android like the plague as the audio passthrough for DTS HD and Dolby True HD, and refresh rate support is too hit and miss)

I'm glad I'm able to have Kodi and SBMC on the Fire TV. Some addons aren't compatible with Krypton still. So for now, I'll use SBMC for some and Krypton for others which work beter.