OpenELEC 3.0.0 released

XBMC.org released a public statement congratulating the folks over at OpenELEC for releasing OpenELEC 3.0.0.  This release brings XBMC Frodo 12.1 with all its bells and whistles to the embedded OS. 

OpenELEC 3.0 is built to support XBMC Frodo 12.1 and almost every part of the core OS has been updated and improved since the 2.0 release. The project now supports a broader range of mediacentre hardware than ever before, including dedicated OS images for the budget friendly Arctic MC001 and ultra-low-cost Raspberry Pi systems.

Raspberry Pi deserves a special mention as it’s been a labour of love for the OpenELEC team. OpenELEC was the very first XBMC distro to be demonstrated on development Pi hardware back in February 2012 while other distros were still talking about future plans and hoping for news on shipping dates. OpenELEC’s leading position was made possible by our close working relationship with the XBMC team; helped by our many users, testers and unaffiliated developers who collaborated to create the Raspberry Pi mediacentre experience. There are too many names to mention you all, but thank you for your hard work!

OpenELEC is also the only platform to support XVBA on AMD GPUs, a little fact that means we support more hardware accelerators than any other XBMC distro 🙂

OpenELEC 3.0 highlights and changes

• XBMC-12.1 (Frodo) – features include:
  • 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:
https://github.com/OpenELEC/OpenELEC.tv/compare/2.0.0…3.0.0

You can find the new release of OpenELEC 3.0.0 on their downloads page