14 DAY TRIAL // The development team behind the OpenELEC Linux-based entertainment operating system designed for embedded devices were proud to announce earlier the release and general availability of OpenELEC 8.0.
Based on the latest Kodi 17.1 "Krypton" open-source and cross-platform media center software, OpenELEC 8.0 is here with a lot of updated internals, as well as support for new platforms, such as the recently launched Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer, WeTek Hub, and WeTek Play 2.
"WeTek Play 2 brings endless entertainment to your living room. Enjoy the latest movies and series in 4K UHD, play games, browse the internet, keep up with the news, or use the DVB modular tuner to watch thousands of TV channels via satellite, terrestrial and cable connections," reads the announcement.
Here's what's new in OpenELEC 8.0
Powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.9 kernel series, the major OpenELEC 8.0 release includes numerous updated components, among which we can mention X.Org Server 1.19, systemd 233, PulseAudio 10.0, Mesa 17.0, LLVM 4.0, FFMpeg 3.2, libva 1.8, GCC 6.3, Glibc 2.25, Binutils 2.28, connman 1.33, libressl 2.4, and Samba 4.6.
Other changes worth mentioning here are the removal of iSCSI support, along with NFS, NBD, and iSCSI network boot support, as well as the support for HFS and HFS+ filesystems. LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control) support got removed from OpenELEC 8.0 as well because it was only used for old IR hardware.
Moreover, it looks like the Apple TV 1 IR remote driver was also removed from this release, which replaces the MySQL database engine with MariaDB 10.1. Other than that, OpenELEC 8.0 the X11 modesettings graphics driver is used by default instead of the AMDGPU, ATI (Radeon) and Intel GPU drivers.
Various DVB and WLAN drivers and firmware were updated as well in OpenELEC 8.0, along with the proprietary Nvidia Legacy graphics driver, which was bumped to version 340.102, thus no longer providing support for Nvidia GPUs that don't support VDPAU. You can download OpenELEC 8.0 right now from our website.