14 DAY TRIAL // OpenELEC 4.0.3, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, has been released and integrates some of the latest proprietary drivers available.
The OpenELEC developers have outed yet another maintenance version of their distribution, but nothing major has changed since the 4.0.2 build. The most important changes are the upgrades for the drivers and for some of the other packages.
“This release includes some bugfixes, security fixes and improvements since OpenELEC-4.0.2. Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we updated XBMC with the last fixes to XBMC 13.1 RC1 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 fixed some (but not all) suspend/wakeup issues, esp. if you run hardware with Intel e1000e Network chips, improved our soundconfig module to autodetect all installed and supported sounddevices and configure them (instead configuring only the first and second sound devices). We also added support for the XBOX-One Remote,” said the developers on the official website.
OpenELEC 4.0.3 is a maintenance build and it shows in the release notes. For example, the NVIDIA drivers have been updated to version 331.79, Mesa has been updated to version 10.1.4, the RPi support patch has been updated as well, support has been added to disable WOL for broken drivers, unneeded applets have been removed from the image, and the soundconfig has been improved and is now capable of handling more than 2 cards at once.
Also, default mapping for XBOX-One remote support has been added, locale support has been enabled for busybox, unicode characters are now printable, and the distribution is more careful when trying to handle eMMC devices.
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.
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 4.0.3 right now from Softpedia.