14 DAY TRIAL // OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, has just reached version 4.0.2 and is now available for download.
The OpenELEC developers have been keeping themselves very busy and they've implemented the latest changes made available along with XBMC 13.1 Beta 2, which arrived only a couple of days ago. Nonetheless, this is considered to be a stable release even if it's based on a Beta.
If you already have an older version of OpenELEC, you might consider upgrading the system instead of installing it from scratch. This can be done safely if the OS is at least at version 3.2. Anything older than this might cause some problems with the plugins and add-ons.
Before upgrading the system, users should also consider performing a backup just to make sure that nothing important gets lost in the process.
“This release includes some bugfixes, security fixes and improvements since OpenELEC-4.0.1. Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we updated XBMC with the last fixes to XBMC 13.1 beta2 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 readded support for older (legacy) Nvidia GPUs to our Generic-i386 build, and removed old GPU drivers to our Generic-x86_64 build. If you use newer 64bit capable hardware you must switch to our Generic-x86-64 builds now and our Generic-i386 builds will support legacy Hardware only in the future,” reads the official OpenELEC announcement.
OpenELEC 4.0.2 is a maintenance build and the release notes reflect this all too well. For example, (e-)MMC support has been added to the generic kernels and to the installer, the installation on devices with included eMMC flash storage, like Intel NUC DE3815TYKHE and DE3815TYBE, is now possible, openvpn has been updated to version 2.3.4, squashfs has been updated to version 4.3, libXfont has been updated to version 1.4.8, and brcmfmac has been added (suspend is now supported).
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 4.0.2 right now from Softpedia.