Kodi media player arrives on Xbox One

Welcome back XBMP

Kodi, the perfectly legal yet notorious media player, is now available to download on your Xbox One. Initial reports suggest availability is restricted by region with Europeans getting first dibs. So be patient if you don't see it yet.

Kodi is a very capable player that’s highly expandable thanks to third-party add-ons that include services for live TV with DVR functionality — something Microsoft isn’t going to provide. But Kodi is perhaps best known as the go to app for piracy due to a wide variety of plugins that let you illegally stream television shows, professional sports, and films from the comfort of your living room. This has led to a cottage industry of so-called "Kodi boxes," often built around cheap HDMI dongles like Amazon's Fire TV sticks. While the XBMC Foundation has attempted to distance itself from the illegal third-party plugins, it's also benefited from the exposure.

Kodi began life as XBMC (Xbox Media Center), or XBMP (Xbox Media Player) if you want to track back to the original incarnation that ran on hacked first-generation Xbox consoles — a capable PC with high-end graphics that Microsoft sold at a loss in order to gain an industry foothold back in the early noughts. So really, it's only fitting that Kodi should return to the roost.