The latest version of the OpenELEC Linux distro is now available for download

May 16, 2014 11:47 GMT  ·  By

OpenELEC 4.0.1, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, is now officially available for download.

The OpenELEC developers are not waiting around for XBMC to get a new stable release and they have adopted the first 13.1 Beta 1 that was made available a couple of days ago. It's likely that they analyzed what the new XBMC was fixing and decided it was safe to implement in their stable version.

“This release includes some bugfixes, security fixes and improvements since OpenELEC-4.0.0 . Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we updated XBMC with the last fixes to XBMC 13.1 beta1 which contains a lot of fixes for issues found after the XBMC-13.0 release (some of them we already shipped with OpenELEC-4.0.0).”

“We included fixes for reported issues like crashing or freeze issues on RaspberryPi and non working calibration setup on RaspberryPi.OpenELEC-4.0.1 is now the next stable release, which is a bugfix and security fix release of the OpenELEC-4.0 series,” reads the official OpenELEC announcement.

Users can now easily update their systems to the new build, but it's recommended not to perform this upgrade if the version of the software is less than 3.2. It's been reported that some plugins and add-ons are not working anymore if the difference between the two versions is too big.

It's also recommended that users perform a complete backup of the system before attempting the upgrade, just to make sure that nothing is lost if something goes wrong.

OpenELEC 4.0.1 is a maintenance release and it shows from the changelog. For example, the Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.14.4, Mesa has been updated to version 10.1.3, libva has been updated to version 1.3.1, a number of upstream patches have been added in order to enable the geometry shaders with LLVM-3.4.1 on radeonsi, the management interface for openvpn has been enabled, and a few upstream patches for the Intel driver have been added.

XBMC 13.0 “Gotham,” the distribution used as a base, comes with Android hardware decoding, various Raspberry Pi and Android speed improvements, stereoscopic 3D Rendering, better touchscreen support, improved UPnP capabilities, lots of audio engine improvements, better subtitle searches, extended Python and JSON-RPC API for developers, FFMpeg 1.2, and much more.

Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and improvements. You can download the latest OpenELEC 4.0.1 right now from Softpedia.