Few days ago the release of the new version of LibreELEC 10.0 was announced which is developed as a fork of the OpenELEC distribution (for the creation of home theater systems) that makes use of the Kodi user interface as its media center.
In this new version of LibreELEC 10.0 Matrix various changes have been made, which developers highlight work done for support enhancements for Raspberry Pi 4, even though it has also been done at the cost that for RPi 3 and earlier this version is not suitable yet, in addition to the fact that for RPi 1 support is discarded.
For those who do not know about LibreELEC, I can tell you that this It is one of the distributions that are suitable to turn any computer into a multimedia center which is as easy to use as a DVD player or set-top box.
The basic principle of the distribution is "everything just works", to obtain a completely ready-to-use environment, all you need to do is load LibreELEC from a flash drive and from then on the user does not have to worry about keeping the system up-to-date: the distribution uses an automatic update and download system That is activated when you connect to the global network. It is possible to extend the functionality of the distribution through a system of plugins that are installed from a separate repository developed by the project developers.
The distribution supports features such as the use of a remote control (it is possible to control both via the infrared port and via Bluetooth), organize file sharing (integrated Samba server), integrated BitTorrent-client transmission, automatic search and connection of local and external units.
Main novelties of LibreELEC 10.0 Matrix
In this new version of the distribution as we mentioned, Removed support for Raspberry Pi 0 and 1 boards and also due to unfinished work on rewriting the drivers graphics, no builds of this new version have been generated for Raspberry Pi 2 and 3.
For its part, in LibreELEC 10.0 main focus is on Raspberry Pi 4 board compatibility, which uses H.264 and H .265 video decoding hardware, support for 4Kp30 video output via HDMI, HDR support, and Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD audio streaming.
The media center of Kodi included has been updated to version 19.1 which offers playback enhancements, improved metadata handling, enhancements to the Kodi user interface, Skins, enhancements to subtitles, security, and personal video recorder (PVR) features, among many other things.
Also DRM upgrade is highlighted, Widevine license and copy protection, which no longer requires any manual intervention by the user.
On the part of known errors In this new version, the developers mention that there is a problem when using profilesSince the LibreELEC configuration plug-in tends to fail when changing to another profile and at the moment there is no solution, so for users who make use of profiles, this version of LibreELEC is not recommended for use.
Finally If you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.
Download LibreELEC 10.0
For download, the images are ready to work from a USB drive or SD card (x86 32 and 64 bit, Raspberry Pi 4, various devices based on Rockchip and Amlogic chips). This you can get by going to the official website of the project and in its download section you will get the picture of it.
Those who download the image for Raspberry Pi, can save the system on their SD card with the help of Etcher which is a multiplatform tool.
Finally the team mention that en the first boot the system will be updated the Kodi media database so the update time may vary depending on the size of your hardware and media collection, this could take several minutes.