14 DAY TRIAL // OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run the famous KODI (former XBMC) media player hub, has been upgraded once more and it's now at version 6.0 Beta 5 and is now ready for download and testing.
OpenELEC is now using the Kodi 15.1 Isengard release, which is the most advanced stable version available. It will be a while until the developers move onto the 16.x branch of Kodi, and that's pretty far off. In the meantime, the current branch of OpenELEC is still under development, and it's coming along just fine.
The operating system switched from the XBMC base for Kodi a while back, and it looks like the community has finally embraced the changes. All traces of the former XBMC have been removed from the operating system, and we'll stop naming the former base on the distribution. Kodi is now well-known and is unlikely that people will continue to make mistakes.
OpenELEC 6.0 Beta 5 is a hefty update
The Openelec development cycle is always a busy one and lots of things happen from one release to another, including new Linux kernels and other major shenanigans.
"The most visible change is Kodi 15.1 (Isengard). Beginning with Kodi 15.0 most audio encoder, audio decoder, PVR and visualisation addons are no longer pre-bundled into OpenELEC but can be downloaded from the Kodi addon repo if required. PVR backends such as VDR and TVHeadend will install needed dependencies automatically," wrote the developers.
Also, FFMpeg has been updated to version 2.6, systemd 219 has been implemented by default, Linux kernel 4.1 has been added, and quite a few other packages have been updated as well.
More details about the changes and improvements can be found in the official announcement. You can download OpenELEC 6.0 Beta 5 right now from Softpedia, but you also have to keep in mind that this is not a regular image. Still, you can run it from a USB key by using the regular tools.