The distribution is based on the new Kodi media hub

Nov 13, 2014 12:42 GMT  ·  By

OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run the Kodi media player solution and to work on most devices, has been updated yet again in the course of just one week.

The OpenELEC operating system used to be based on XBMC, but that is changing right now. The old XBMC is being renamed to Kodi and a new major version is in the works. For now, Kodi is still under development, but it's making great progress and it should arrive pretty soon in its final form.

This also means that OpenELEC is looking to integrate the latest Kodi version, just as it did with XBMC, and is following closely all the improvements that are made to the media hub. On the other hand, the developers of this distro have to worry about various other packages as well, not just about XBMC. There is the Linux kernel to be considered, the drivers, and all the other critical components.

OpenELEC based on Kodi runs pretty smoothly

As the version number suggests, it is still not stable and it will take a while until the final version is out. If you are using this branch of the distribution, upgrading each time a new release is made available is a very good idea.

"The OpenELEC 4.95 release series are test releases (beta) for OpenELEC-5.0. OpenELEC-5.0 will be the next stable release, which is a feature release and the successor of OpenELEC-4.2."

"The headline change is the big switch from XBMC to Kodi branding. Both project teams have conducted a major find/replace but if you spot residual mentions of XBMC anywhere please let us know. The name change affects more than the GUI; all references in code have been changed and in the OpenELEC filesystem /storage/.xbmc will be recreated as a symlink to /storage/.kodi to ensure hardcoded paths in addons or scripts continue to work," say the developers in the official announcement.

The OpenELEC devs have integrated the NVIDIA 340.58 drivers, xorg-server 1.16.2, Mesa 10.3.3, and FFMpeg 2.4.3. As you can see, this distro follows all the latest versions for the packages that are integrated because it needs to run on very new hardware, and that can only be accomplished by integrating all the most recent packages. There is no word on the Linux kernel, but it will almost certainly get updated in the coming weeks.

More details about the changes and improvements can be found in the official announcement. You can download the latest OpenELEC 5.0 Beta 2 right now from Softpedia.

OpenELEC 5.0 Beta 2 (7 Images)

OpenELEC 5.0 Beta 2 main menu
Video output setting for OpenELEC 5.0 Beta 2Storage options for OpenELEC 5.0 Beta 2
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