

OpenELEC 5.0 - forlorn
http://openelec.tv/news/22-releases/153-openelec-5-0-released

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pserwylo
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.

~~~
tracker1
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.

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vegardx
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.

~~~
bduerst
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?

~~~
jpierre
There are a few sites that deal with single-board computer news like:
[http://armdevices.net](http://armdevices.net)
[http://liliputing.com](http://liliputing.com)
[http://linuxgizmos.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](http://www.hardkernel.com/main/main.php)

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

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Ra1d3n
This is a very confusing name. My first thought was that this is a opensource
election software.

~~~
lnanek2
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.

~~~
sciurus
XBMC just changed its name to Kodi.

[http://kodi.tv/](http://kodi.tv/)

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ChikkaChiChi
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?

~~~
kayone
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.

~~~
Veratyr
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.

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storrgie
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.

~~~
petepete
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.

~~~
hkarthik
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.

~~~
petepete
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/2mdrFYx)
[http://imgur.com/nqppci9](http://imgur.com/nqppci9)
[http://imgur.com/xB2AN1H](http://imgur.com/xB2AN1H)

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royjacobs
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!).

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Panino
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?

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Nux
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!

~~~
johnchristopher
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).

~~~
Nux
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
...

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

