Download OpenELEC 2.0 Beta 5

Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center is based on XBMC and aims to turn a computer into a full-fledged HTPC. OpenELEC is easy to install, maintain and use, as well as being small and lightning fast. In addition to the standard download, special versions are available for AMD’s Fusion, Nvidia’s ION, Apple TV, and the Xtreamer Ultra TV. The developers have released the fifth beta version of OpenELEC 2.0 with the following announcement:

OpenELEC 2.0 Beta 5 released

The OpenELEC team is proud to release the 5th beta of OpenELEC 2.0! Internally this is known by the less-catchy name OpenELEC 1.95.5 🙂

After the release of OpenELEC Beta 4 we received again many new bug reports. Some or most of the Issues related to bad video output should be fixed now. Other then that we are happy to support High@L5.1 videos with our AMD graphic driver via XVBA. Another new feature is exFAT support as an additional Filesystem. As these are significant changes and to be sure we have solved most of the reported issues we have decided to release Beta 5 :-).

Starting with Beta 4 we also check for corrupt update files before upgrading commences. On very rare occasions the download of our updates were incomplete and caused the system to fail after reboot. As our user base grows, rarer problems such as this one will emerge and be dealt with in a similar manner. This change will reduce the number of upgrades problems.

To manually update the procedure is the same as before however you must also copy KERNEL.md5 and SYSTEM.md5 to the update folder/share together with KERNEL and SYSTEM.

There are 470 changes by 16 authors and 150 closed issues since Beta 4 (1.95.4). The most important changes are:

• reworked Python support for faster addon startup
• update to samba-3.6.6
• rework samba with patches from OpenWRT, so we save more then 5MB in our builds
• update to linux-3.2.21
• some speed optimizations
• replace udev with systemd, udev is now part of systemd
• update to busybox-1.20.2
• remove package ‘bash’, busybox’s ‘ash’ works good enough
• update to xorg-server-1.12.2
• update to xf86-video-fglrx-12.6
• update to xf86-video-nvidia-302.17
• switch to external ffmpeg its easier to maintain and update
• update to ffmpeg-0.10.4
• update to libnfs-1.3
• patch XBMC to support metadata support via libshairport
• update to gcc-4.7.1
• build XBMC texture packer and pack XBMC’s themes
• add exFAT partition support

We would like to thank our users, team members and partners for testing, reporting and fixing issues, creating how-to documents, developing new features, and their donations of hardware and funds to the project. We appreciate your continued support!