14 DAY TRIAL // On July 16, the OpenELEC development team informed us all about the immediate availability for download and testing of the third Beta build of the anticipated OpenELEC 6.0 GNU/Linux operating system designed for embedded devices.
According to the release announcement, it would appear that OpenELEC 6.0 Beta 3 is based on the recently announced Kodi 15.0 "Isengard" RC2 (Release Candidate 2) open-source and cross-platform media center software, previously known as XBMC Media Center.
Many of the internal components of OpenELEC were updated as well in the new Beta build, among which we can mention FFMpeg 2.6, Mesa 10.6, X.Org Server 1.17, Linux kernel 4.1, libva 1.6, systemd 219, Binutils 2.25, Glibc 2.21, libressl 2.1.7, and LLVM 3.6.
Additionally, there's also support for X.Org's new input driver system that's rebased on the libinput library. Numerous GPU drivers and X.Org libraries were updated as well in the third Beta release of the forthcoming OpenELEC 6.0 operating system to support newer video cards.
"The most visible change is the update from Kodi-14.2 Helix to Kodi-15.0 Isengard (rc 2). Beginning with Kodi-15 most audio encoder, audio decoder, PVR and visualisation addons are no longer included in our base OS, but they are available via Kodi's addon manager and must be installed from there, if needed," reads the announcement.
WeTek'sWeTek Play devices are now officially supported
In the announcement for OpenELEC 6.0 Beta 3, the developers brag about the fact that WeTek'sWeTek Play devices are now officially supported. Furthermore, there's now support for all Solidrun CuBox-i/TV devices, as well as OSMC's Vero and Solidrun Hummingboard devices in the iMX6 builds.
You can download OpenELEC 6.0 Beta 3 right now via Softpedia or directly from the project's website, but please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version that has rough edges. Thus, we don't recommend installing it on production devices.