A fresh RC has been made available for OpenELEC

Dec 22, 2014 09:20 GMT  ·  By

OpenELEC, a powerful embedded operating system built specifically to run the Kodi media player hub and to run on most available hardware, has been updated once more and the developers are getting closer to the final version.

Users know that OpenELEC is a Linux distro based on the XBMC project, but that is slowly changing. The developers behind the XBMC project are changing the name to Kodi and that needs to be reflected in OpenELEC as well.

Starting with this new release, the latest OS will be using Kodi. If you are an XBMC fan, then you don't need to worry. The base will remain pretty much the same, with the exception of the name and some new features.

XMBC will be named Kodi, but it's not the only modification. In fact, the upcoming Kodi version to land pretty soon is probably the best one in the series and the devs have made a huge number of changes and improvements. That means that all new content will eventually land in OpenELEC as well.

A new Release Candidate for OpenELEC 5.0 is out

One of the most interesting features of OpenELEC is the fact that it usually integrates all latest packages, some of them released just for a few days. The OS is capable of running on multiple architectures, including ARM64, and most importantly, it's able to run on the latest hardware.

"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."

"After many years, support for the mk1 (silver) AppleTV build has been discontinued, and there will be no official v5.0 (Kodi) release for Apple devices. This decision was partly driven by the Kodi development team removing CrystalHD acceleration support in Kodi v14.0 and the unrelated removal of the CrystalHD driver from the v3.17 Linux kernel," said the developers.

The distribution is now using Linux kernel 3.17.7, dbus 1.8.12, ethtool 3.18, and a few other updated packages. Also, the reboot process has been improved, deinterlace has been disabled by default, and a number of smaller fixes have been implemented.

More details about the changes and improvements can be found in the official announcement. You can download the latest OpenELEC 5.0 RC3 right now from Softpedia.

OpenELEC (10 Images)

OpenELEC 5.0 main menu
Help menu in OpenELEC 5.0Video add-ons in OpenELEC 5.0
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