OpenELEC 5.0 | Hacker News Reader

OpenELEC 5.0

openelec.tv

109 pointsforlorn33 comments

After my original RaspberryPi which was used for a media centre running OpenELEC died, I've gotten a new Pi and installed Raspbmc on it. Although it did what it said on the box, and I am appreciative for the work done by that team, going back to OpenELEC today was particularly nice. Usually I like to customize my linux machines, but with media centres, I'm more than happy to take something pretty much stock, and just use it.

I downloaded the 5.0 image (which I didn't realise was only just released), dd'ed it to my SD card, booted the pi, and then ran the first run wizard (pretty much clicking next on everything except the dhcp config).

Quick, easy, and enjoyable. Thanks to everyone for all your hard work making this distro.

I used a Cubox-i4pro for a while with OpenELEC and it was nice enough (some 1080p content wasn't smooth) when it didn't lock up. It worked well enough while the PSU in my htpc was dead. I haven't redone it since the sd card self-wiped.

I haven't really looked at it since. It was a nice option, and there still isn't a good Ubuntu experience on the device, so it sits unused at the moment.

I can warmly recommend the Gigabyte Brix GB-BXBT-2807 to anyone looking for a completely fanless, quick, and fully supported device. As of OpenELEC 5.0 wireless and bluetooth has been working out of the box. They're on the expensive side of the spectrum, but very quick and neat little boxes.

another one: any chromebox (and use the EZ Setup script for OpenELEC) (I have the hp one and am very happy with it)

I can't believe I didn't think of the Chromebox when researching for a good device. They look perfect for the job, and a lot cheaper too since you don't have to get DDR3L memory.

This is tangental, but is there a place online that aggregates all of these smaller boxes or boards?

For example, if I'm looking for something more powerful than a Raspberry Pi / Arduino / Beagle, etc. but not quite the level of an i3, where would I look?

There are a few sites that deal with single-board computer news like: http://armdevices.net http://liliputing.com http://linuxgizmos.com

Quickly, you might take a look at the ODROID boards, they nicely cover the lower price and performance spectrum and do a nice job supporting them: http://www.hardkernel.com/main/main.php

This is exactly what I'm looking for, thank you!

This is a very confusing name. My first thought was that this is a opensource election software.

Agreed. At least XBMC had "media" in there. If they are going to use such meaningless names, they should just always stick "media software" after the name in all posts or something.

XBMC just changed its name to Kodi.

http://kodi.tv/

I kinda like how `KODI` comes from known visuals.

To me XBMC has always sounded more about XBOX than MediaCenter and it feels weird running it on the pi on pc when it has nothing anymore to do with XBox.

> At least XBMC had "media" in there.

OpenELEC also has "Entertainment"and "center" in there.

Would never have guessed that it stands for Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center.

Since their initial Chromecast support, Plex has won out in my home thanks to its better metadata support and sharing libraries through their website.

Does anyone with OpenELEC/Kodi experience if this is still the case? Should I switch?

I do the same thing - NAS to store media, with plex running on my laptop (which is always on anyway) chromecast on my tv and the plex app on my phone to control everything. Definitely feels like the future, but like you I'd be curious to know how this setup compares to others.

I want to switch to plex for my TV media center software, I really do but the thing that keeps making me move back to xbmc/kodi is the seek lag (trying to skip to the middle of a movie) and sometimes it just freezes while fast forwarding.

to be fair, I haven't use the plex media center app, my experience is based on chromecast/android app and the android tv app. (my plex server is running a quadcore haswell i5 with 8gb of ram so it should be fairly responsive)

I bought an android TV purely for plex but so far it has been a bit disappointing.

I haven't used the Android app but I can vouch for the Media Center app. We use it nearly every night at home and it works beautifully.

Is Plex open source? I seem to recall it having closed source components. If that is still the case then it isn't a real alternative to Kodi/OpenELEC in my view.

We used to use XBMC and switched to Plex. We still use XBMC occasionally when I haven't added something to Plex yet but in general I find the experience of Plex is much nicer. Once you set it up you can pretty much just forget about it.

I haven't found any way for XBMC to transcode and stream or sync to other devices, which are very handy features of Plex that I'd hate to lose.

Even just having a unified experience is great. It feels painful having to browse through countless third party apps on the Play Store just to find a remote that works. Plex has an official app that's clearly branded as such. Plus having one library for all the devices around the place is great. XBMC doesn't seem to do that as far as I can see.

I just bought the cubox to try this out on (Before that I was using i3 intel NUCs, so my cost will go from around 400$ per node to 100$ per node). I cannot even begin to evangelize how awesome this project is. You can keep all your source content in a central place with very little system requirements and do all the unpacking on a tiny arm/intel system. Interface is fantastic, and paired with yaste its the best media center experience that exists today.

I have this exact setup: a Cubox-i4 Pro in the front room and RPi in a bedroom) connected to my QNAP NAS which runs a shared (MySQL) library; it's fantastic. Can't recommend it highly enough.

Any suggestions on a good android device (not a phone) for running Yaste? I've been extremely unimpressed with all the home theater remote options on the market now.

I run it on my Nexus 10 as well as my phone and it's fairly nice. It's not quite as polished as Plex imo but it's improving at a decent pace; updates are very frequent.

I uploaded some screenshots of it on my N10: http://imgur.com/2mdrFYx http://imgur.com/nqppci9 http://imgur.com/xB2AN1H

Is it possible to pop up Chrome with this setup to do some lightweight browsing on the TV?

Not without installing extensions or plugins[0]. I like and use Yatse but primarily control Kodi via CEC using my TV's remote, which wouldn't really be suitable for browsing.

A simpler method would be to use Miracast or Chromecast for this.

[0] http://openelec.tv/forum/chromium-browser/69999-chromium-bro...

> paired with yaste its the best media center experience that exists today.

How does it compare with Plex[1]

[1]: http://www.plex.tv/

I've used it on an Intel Celeron machine and it was absolutely wonderful, apart from the fact that the machine had the Intel 24p bug.

I've recently switched to a Zotac PI320 which is very nice as well, but sadly due to some UEFI nonsense it can't boot OpenElec :( This is a shame as it's easily the simplest way to get a Kodi installation up and running (and automatically updated!).

Nice, this release switches from OpenSSL to LibreSSL. Also kernel 3.6.17, with the new getrandom(2) syscall. Good crypto improvements.

One question I have is how LibreSSL allows them to drop both OpenSSL and GnuTLS -- why did they previously require both?

Very grateful for the OpenELEC distribution. Worked great on my RPi and now seriously considering to replace Fedora on my HTPC NUC with it, as well.

If any of the devs read this, THANKS a bunch and happy new year!

The only gripe I have with OpenELEC is the fact `their` linux isn't as easy to add applications to than raspbmc is (or other distribution paired with xbmc/kodi).

The price to pay for having an awesome, stable, but specialised distro. It is indeed significantly harder to add new software to an OpenElec installation ...

For potential XBMC users, check out xbmcbuntu. gives you a little more freedom to install / do whatever you want in comparison to OpenELEC.

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