14 DAY TRIAL // OpenELEC is a Linux distribution designed and built to run the Kodi mediacenter and to function on embedded systems, like Raspberry Pi for example. A new major update has been released for the OS and users can now take a closer look at the changes that are being made.
Some of the users who are not up to speed with what's been happening on the OpenELEC front might notice that Kodi has replaced XBMC, but that's just in name. In fact, the old and tried XBMC media center has changed its name to Kodi a while back, although there is no stable release available yet with the new name.
The development cycle of the two projects, OpenELEC and Kodi, are intertwined and the developers of the OS are usually very quick to integrate the latest changes and improvements made to the media center.
This is the reason why OpenELEC is in the Beta stable. It will remain like this until a stable Kodi version sees the light of day.
Latest OpenELEC release follows the bleeding edge trend
Besides the integration of the latest Kodi, the devs of the operating system need to add a ton of other packages and most of them are on the bleeding edge. In fact, very few distros actually feature such advanced software and OpenELEC is definitely an exception.
On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense to have all of these packages ready because the distro must run on pretty much everything and there is only one way to achieve that, but implementing all the latest apps and core components.
"We added Freescale imx6 support and after many years of support the mk1 (silver) AppleTV build has been discontinued and there will be no official v5.0 (Kodi) release. 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."
"The headline change is the big switch from XBMC to Kodi branding. 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," wrote the developers.
Also, the Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.17.4, the Intel Mesa drivers are now at version 10.3.4, a number of patches that were no longer needed have been removed, and the Kodi based has been updated.
Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and improvements. You can download OpenELEC 5.0 Beta 4 right now from Softpedia.
