The developers are on a roll and are releasing one version after another

Nov 30, 2012 09:11 GMT  ·  By

OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, is now at version 3.0 Beta 2.

Just a few days after the previous update, the OpenELEC.tv developers have come up with another version. It's still in the beta stages, but there are plenty of changes to go around.

In case you didn't catch the first announcement, this current development release is based on XBMC 12.0 Frodo, a free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media available for multiple platforms.

The second beta for OpenELEC 3.0 has been released mostly because of nasty bug, fixing a non-working video output on some ATV builds.

The developers have added the Nvidia's 304.64 driver as a legacy version to be used with the ATV builds. This means that the users who utilize the Generic builds, together with GPUs older than Geforce 8xxx, should switch to the Generic_OSS or decide to change their Graphic card to a newer model (which would also add VDPAU support).

OpenELEC 3.0 Beta 2 further comes with a new option for the settings add-on, allowing users to change the amount of time before a hard disk goes into standby, as well as some fixes for MCE compatible remotes.

Last but not least, this build updates the Intel and AMD graphic driver to the latest stable versions (xf86-video-intel-2.12.14 and xf86-video-fglrx-12.10).

OpenELEC.tv developers have issued an advisory note regarding the upgrade to the new version: if you intend to update to the beta release, from our actual stable OpenELEC-1.0 or OpenELEC-2.0, we STRONGLY advise you to make a backup of XBMC’s data files first and start with a fresh XBMC user.

A complete list of changes can be found in the official announcement.

Download OpenELEC 3.0 Beta 2 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.