14 DAY TRIAL // OpenELEC 4.0.4, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, is out and uses XBMC 13.1 as a base.
The OpenELEC makers are following the XBMC development cycle very closely and they have released a new version of their distribution, 4.0.4. It comes packed with all the goodies from XBMC 13.1 “Gotham” and the devs have made some changes of their own.
“This release includes some bugfixes, security fixes and improvements since OpenELEC-4.0.3. Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we updated XBMC with the last fixes to XBMC 13.1 (final) 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 found and fixed with the help of ‘popcornmix’ some RaspberryPi related issues in kernel, firmware and XBMC code. Many thanks to him for the help! OpenELEC-4.0.4 is now the next stable release, which is a bugfix and securityfix release of the OpenELEC-4.0 series,” said the developers on the official website.
OpenELEC 4.0.3 features some pretty interesting updates and fixes. For example, e2fsprogs has been updated to version 1.42.10, bluez has been updated to version 5.19, fontconfig is now at version 2.11.1, systemd 213 has been integrated by default, gnutls 3.2.12 has been added to fix some security problems, and a new Linux kernel, 3.14.5, has been implemented.
Also, the DVB-T2 support for GeniaTech T220 / August T210 devices has been fixed, support has been added to disable WOL for broken drivers, “e1000e” has been added as broken driver, and the RPi support patch has been updated.
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.
If you try to update from an older version of the operating system you might find that some of the plugins and add-ons are no longer working. It's also advisable to back up the system before attempting an upgrade.
XBMC 13.1 “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 4.0.4 right now from Softpedia.