Last week on the podcast we speculated that OpenELEC 3.0 was close to release and sure enough here it is. OpenELEC 3.0 is an embedded version of XBMC that can be packaged on to a USB boot drive as well as a standard install. Version 3 includes XBMC 12.1 and supports the Raspberry Pi as well as Intel and AMD platforms.
You can give it a try by downloading the image and making a bootable USB drive and not have to touch your current install. More details and the download on the openelec blog
DTS-MA and Dolby True-HD via XBMC’s new AudioEngine (not on AMD and RPi)
Greatly improved Live TV and PVR support
Improved image support, allowing the database to use additional image types.
Support for the Raspberry Pi
Better Airplay support across all platforms
Advanced Filtering in the library
Advanced UPnP sharing
AudioEngine brings improved detection of audio hardware, but may change the naming of audio devices and the way audio is handled on your system. If anything stops working after updating, please visit XBMC settings and update your configuration. You should also remove /storage/.config/asound.conf from your system.
Path substitution should not be used to sync thumbnails and other art between XBMC devices in Frodo. For more information about this change see: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Sync_multiple_libraries/Upgrading_XBMC_to_v12
PVR support has been extended to a wide range of DVB devices and 4TheRecord, DVB Viewer, Mediaportal, MythTV, NextPVR, TVHeadend, VDR, Njoy N7 and VU+ support has been built-into the OS.
With XBMC Frodo version stable, OpenELEC provides a solution for Raspberry Pi users wanting to use XBMC. Raspberry PI is the first ARM device that is officially supported by OpenELEC. We would like to thank “Gimli”, “Popcornmix” and “FernetMenta” for helping us port OpenELEC to the RaspberryPi and accepting our patches and improvements so that other projects can benefit from our work.
The dedicated ARCTIC_MC image has been created for our new partner Arctic to use on MC001 devices (all, including any barebones). For more information see: “Arctic announces passive cooled Systems with OpenELEC installed”.
The size of our active AppleTV user-base has been steadily increasing; in part due to the gradual decline in development among older homebrew linux distros. OpenELEC 3.0 has a number of improvements for Apple TV users; up-to-date CrystalHD and nVidia drivers, a host of patches to XBMC that improve HD playback, and new recruit to the ATV cause ‘Dag Wieers’ has been poking the kernel in ways that Kronenbourg would never dream of to understand behaviours, reduce size and improve performance. There are further great changes lined up for the OpenELEC 3.1 ATV release so stay tuned!
AMD XVBA support has been stabilised, with code introduced to correct issues with H264 videos so you can enjoy them without artifacts. Our original plan was also to implement the new xvba-sdk 0.75 specification. This would add support for mpeg2 which is essential for LiveTV, and mpeg4 to give a nice improvement to codec support while helping to keep CPU usage low. However, we are stuck with an ageing driver from October 2012 due to severe problems with Vertical Blank Sync in every AMD driver released since then. Lots of feedback has been given on these problems but there are no signs of improvement from AMD. This puts the project in a tricky position where the list of issues slowly increases and we are powereless to do anything that helps our users. Our hope that AMD can rise to the challenge and fulfill their potential on Linux is slowly fading, and if nothing improves we may be forced into formally abandoning support for AMD devices to prevent a growing support problem.
For a full changelog on what’s new, follow the link below:
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