Tag: media centre

OpenELEC 3.0.0 is here!

It’s been a bit of a month for media player news – we just featured the arrival of Plex for the Pi last week, and we were really pleased to see a new book by Sam Nazarko on setting up Raspbmc on your Pi has just been put out by Pakt Publishing.

Today, there’s more good news for OpenELEC fans. We’re really grateful to the OpenELEC team, who have worked themselves to the bone on getting things running on the Pi; they were the first XBMC distro to be demonstrated on development Pi hardware back in February last year, were the first ever HardFP distribution (that appeared in March 2012).

Stephan Raue says:

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’s leading position was made possible by our close working relationship with the XBMC team and many other upstream projects.

From the OpenELEC website:

What is OpenELEC?

Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center, or OpenELEC (http://www.openelec.tv) for short, is a small Linux distribution built from scratch as a platform to turn your computer into a complete XBMC media center (http://www.xbmc.org). OpenELEC is designed to make your system boot as fast as possible and the install is so easy that anyone can turn a blank PC into a media machine in less than 15 minutes.

  • It’s completely free
  • A full install is only 80-125MB
  • Minimal hardware requirements
  • Simple install to HDD, SSD, Compact Flash, SD card, pen drive or other
  • Optimized builds for Atom, ION, Intel, Fusion, RaspberryPi and more
  • Simple configuration through the XBMC interface
  • Plug and Play external storage
  • File sharing out of the box

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

For more on AudioEngine support, PVR support and more, visit the OpenELEC site. Huge thanks to all the developers who have put so much work into the OpenELEC on the Pi; we’re very grateful!

 

RasPlex: Plex for your Pi

If you’re a media centre user of the Raspberry Pi, you might want to check out this new port of Plex to the Pi. RasPlex is a open, platform-independent home entertainment system (so you can play media from any of the machines you have cluttering up the house using the RasPlex media server. Great news for people like me who just can’t shake an iTunes addiction).

RasPlex is currently in Beta, but plans are in place to support Plex channels – which means that eventually, you should be able to use Netflix, Hulu and all that good stuff on your Pi. We’ll be watching progress very closely. Click the image above, or visit the RasPlex site to learn more.

 

Raspbmc – final version released

News for all you media-player types from Sam Nazarko, the terrifyingly young developer of Raspbmc:

Although the Raspberry Pi’s real goal is education, its powerful GPU has made the device very popular amongst HTPC tinkerers and enthusiasts.

I’ve been working on Raspbmc for a year and am now happy to announce the final release and congratulate XBMC on such a remarkable new release. Raspbmc is a self-updating Linux distribution that brings XBMC to the Raspberry Pi with simple installation. It can be run off an SD card, USB drive or even an NFS share and fully supports WiFi out of the box.

Raspbmc comes with AirPlay, PVR, 1080p playback and much more. You can read more about what Raspbmc can do at www.raspbmc.com/about and be up and running in less than 20 minutes.

 

Sam’s got a little more to say about things Raspbmc in a post on his blog about this final version of the software. Nice one, Sam – thanks!

OpenELEC for Raspberry Pi

The guys at OpenELEC, an embedded OS built specifically to run XBMC, have announced their first ARM port and with it, support for Raspberry Pi. (Please note that although their website says that they can only support the Model B, the post was written just before we announced the upgrade doubling the Model A’s RAM.) I’m a week or so late to the party on this – apologies to Gimli and Stephan for the delay in posting this while we wrestled with launch stuff here.

When a download is available (which should be pretty soon, and I should point out that we have been the limiting factor here; we need to get one of the boards with a replaced magjack out to the guys so they can test it on a production board – that’s Gimli’s alpha board you can see in the video), we’ll be hosting it on our downloads page.

A quick word from Stephan:

What is OpenELEC?
OpenELEC is an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub. The idea behind OpenELEC is to allow people to use their Home Theatre PC (HTPC) like any other device you might have attached to your TV, like a DVD player or Sky box. Instead of having to manage a full operating system, configure it and install the packages required to turn it into a hybrid media center, OpenELEC is designed to be simple to install, manage and use, making it more like running a set-top box than a full-blown computer.

OpenELEC is tiny, at 85-115MB, and for RaspberryPi it comes in at only 70MB, which comprises the whole OS including XBMC, Python, and all services/tools needed to run XBMC. This means that at the moment, it’s the smallest distro for Raspberry Pi that we’ve seen.