The developers behind the popular Kodi media center application announced that version 18 of the app will be available in 64-bit for Windows. Going forward, all capable platforms will have a 64-bit build.
According to the XBMC Foundation, users have been asking for this since 2012, but it wasn"t a simple process to compile Kodi in 64-bit. Since the app was originally available on the Xbox (XBMC, or Xbox Media Center), there was a lot of legacy code there that wasn"t an issue for other platforms.
The team had to "clean up" its build system, as many of the external libraries used were meant for 32-bit, and "code was scattered everywhere". All of that had to become untangled, and the team has ported 31 libraries to 64-bit.
The organization also said that this is a "big step" toward releasing a UWP app, which it announced back in February. The UWP app will mark a return to its roots, as Kodi will once again be available on Xbox consoles, and work is "slowly progressing".
But the UWP app will involve the same libraries that were necessary for the conversion to 64-bit, so this is certainly a milestone. Still, the XBMC Foundation says that there are still over 800 function calls that need to be changed, so of course, there"s still plenty of work to be done.
If you want to check out the 64-bit version of Kodi 18 for Windows, you can download it here by selecting Windows, and then Development Builds.