14 DAY TRIAL // On May 7, the OpenELEC development team, through Stephan Raue, had the pleasure of announcing the general availability for download and testing of the first Beta version of OpenELEC 6.0, a Linux kernel-based operating system for embedded devices.
Powered by Linux kernel 4.0 and Kodi 15.0 (Isengard), a popular media center application that was previously known as XBMC Media Center, OpenELEC 6.0 Beta 1 brings a number of interesting new features but also improves performance and addresses some of the bugs that were present in previous versions of the project.
"The most visible change is the update from Kodi-14.2 Helix to Kodi-15.0 Isengard (beta 1)," says Stephan Raue. "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."
OpenELEC 6.0 drops support for 32-bit architectures
Besides the Kodi 15.0 base, another interesting feature in OpenELEC 6.0 Beta 1 is that it drops support for 32-bit hardware architectures. The 64-bit generic builds now contain the latest Nvidia GPU drivers, and there's support for WeTek'sWeTek Play devices.
Most of OpenELEC's core components have been updated as well, including FFMpeg 2.6, Mesa 10.5, systemd 219, Binutils 2.25, LLVM 3.6, Glibc 2.21, and libressl 2.1.6. Support for X.Org's new libinput-based input driver system was also implemented.
Last but not least, the iMX6 build of OpenELEC 6.0 now supports all Solidrun CuBox-i/TV devices, OSMC's Vero, as well as Solidrun Hummingboard. Several other components have also been updated to their latest versions.
Download OpenELEC 6.0 Beta 1 right now via Softpedia or directly from the project's website, which has just received a new, modern design. Please keep in mind though that this is a pre-release version that might contain unresolved issues.