LibreELEC Blog

Fantastic little board. I have a couple of these each with a sata card and a few rusty 8TB drives attached. They run Libreelec with Zerotier and a few basic bash scripts to sync some directories. One lives in my living room and one lives at my parents house. Works as on site backup for me, and offsite for Dad as well as vice versa. Kodi is my favourite media centre software, been a fan since XBMC rolled into the scene. https://libreelec.tv/ https://www.zerotier.com/ https://kodi.tv/

If you haven't tried it, try https://libreelec.tv/, I got a new Pi 4 to replace my old Pi 3B+ that I had been running Kodi directly (or whatever the original form of it is called) on and it came with an SD card with NOOBS on it so I decided to install LibreELEC and give it a shot since that was one of the easy-install options. The UI still isn't great and feels like no one has thought through anything, but it's way better than Kodi was (I have yet to have it pop up full screen in the middle of watching a movie to ask if it can update itself) and I haven't had nearly as many crashes (or any, in fact).

I think the three comments in this thread leading to my reply have it wrong. I see the top comment as being clear. I see the next three comments complaining about the website. What exactly is wrong with it? It's very clear to me. Perhaps you three should learn more about how to use the internet instead of expecting websites to spoon-feed you everything that you don't know. Websites can't, and shouldn't be expected, to know what you don't know. I opened the posted link [0]. It's clearly a blog. What's it about? It's about LibreELEC. There's a LibreELEC logo in the top left. Click that and it [1] clearly says "Just enough OS for KODI". What is KODI, I wonder? Double-click the word, right-click, search with your favorite search engine. The first result is the homepage for KODI [2] which clearly says it's open source home theatre software. There's no frills. There's no javashit. This website clearly and plainly works. I like it. [0]: http://libreelec.tv/2021/08/26/libreelec-matrix-10-0/ [1]: http://libreelec.tv/ [2]: https://kodi.tv/

- Two LibreELEC (https://libreelec.tv/) mediaplayers in house (yes, one is not enough in my big family). - One for hosting low usage applications at home network (Unifi controller and some more). - Octoprint (https://octoprint.org) connected to the 3d-printer. - One on my desk for hardware hacking – mostly as just a PC with GPIO. - Some wireless Raspberry Pi Zeros as security cameras.

You might be interested in the https://libreelec.tv/ project. Kodi for low end devices. Which uses HDMI CEC to allow for your tv remote to control the Kodi interface.

> and now latest being rPi4. OpenELEC image, a few plugins, youtube key and that's it. If you are interested in the latest Kodi, check out "libreelec" [0] a maintained fork of "openelec". "openelec" support was dropped in 2017 [1]. [0] https://libreelec.tv/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenELEC

You can do it all with two streaming devices, an Apple TV, and a Raspberry Pi running LibreElec: https://libreelec.tv And the Raspberry Pi is $35 so it's not a hugely expensive addition.

Kodi is awesome... I'm currently developing a little helper to link RFID cards to specific actions (like play an audio or video file). Everyone who is insterested in Kodi should definitely take a look at the "all in one" distributions for Raspbery and friends: Libreelec (https://libreelec.tv/, sucessor of OpenElec) is a superfast standalone OS that can be flashed and has autoupdate - due to readonly FS it is not as customizable, than raspbian, but therefore very easy and fast. OSMC (https://osmc.tv/) is similar to Libreelec, but with support for installing extra packages, but a little slower boot time and non-readonly-FS. Ideal if you would like to make use of custom scripts, GPIO buttons, RFIDs or webcam. Kodi also has a HUGE JSONRPC-API (https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v12), that supports nearly every feature to be controlled remotely via script or App and has a pretty nice webinterface.

My Kodi set-up is a few-years-old copy of LibreELEC[1] set to NOT auto update. I've barely configured it beyond giving the SMB paths to my video collection. I ignore all the meta-data rubbish it wants to add, and just browse to what I want to watch via the text-based list that's built into the default skin. It's all running on a Raspberry Pi 3b hooked into my big home theatre rig. Granted, 90% of my Kodi viewing is Dr Who episodes[2] so I'm probably not the target market for it, but as long as you don't fiddle with it, it works just fine. What I WOULD like is a new skin that strips everything out of the UI except my video library. I have absolutely no use for the music section, the photos(who seriously uses that?!) or the weather. I've briefly looked into the XML that is used for Kodi skinning, but life is too short for me even to want to go there. --- [1] https://libreelec.tv/ [2] http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/drwho/

There's several. I'm fond of https://libreelec.tv/

Interesting. Thankfully, LibreElec think the Raspberry Pi 5 is strictly better, despite shifting to software decoding: > BCM2712 supports HEVC 4K60 hardware decoding. It no longer supports H264 in hardware. This might sound odd but it removes the RPi4’s 1080p restriction on H264 decoding and the 4K H264 test media we have has played. The big increase in performance from the Quad-Core A76 chip means RPi5 can software decode AV1, H264, VC1, VP9, and more at 1080p with ease https://libreelec.tv/2023/09/28/rpi5-support/

There have been good cheap options for TV boxes for quite a while (the Amlogic S905 was released in 2014). They were game changers back then. That said, LibreElec has been beta testing the RPi5 and will support it. Dev images are ready: https://libreelec.tv/2023/09/28/rpi5-support/

From Libreelec article on RPI4: "The 4B hardware is HDR capable, but software support has a dependency on the new Linux kernel frameworks merged by Intel developers (with help from Team LibreELEC/Kodi) in Linux 5.2 and a kernel bump will be needed to use them. Once the initial excitement and activity from the 4B launch calms down, serious work on HDR and transitioning Raspberry Pi over to the new GBM/V4L2 video pipeline can start." Full article: https://libreelec.tv/2019/06/libreelec-9-2-alpha1-rpi4b/

The LibreELEC developer said that the hardware is HDR (10bit) compatible and "only" the software side is missing for now. https://libreelec.tv/2019/06/libreelec-9-2-alpha1-rpi4b/

HPC=high performance compute. I'm not sure that HDR would come up there. Maybe you are thinking of HTPC (home theater personal computer)? I actually was just looking this up, quite randomly. I think it is actually a soft no, in the sense that support is essentially non-existent now, but it is being worked on. It appears to be an annoying situation where HDCP (high definition content protect, I think) content has some sort of encryption baked in that requires proprietary driver/hardware support. Since the main use case for HDR is watching movies, and we can't do that without the proprietary stuff, there's not a ton of incremental value for the community to get by working on it. But Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and Red Hat are all working on it. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Red-Hat-Hiring… Also this recent version of libreelec https://libreelec.tv/2021/11/03/libreelec-matrix-10-0-1/ advertises that they can process (decode?) 4k, 10 bit video, on a raspberry pi 4, but they apparently only 8 bit output is actually available. Not sure if this is a hardware or software limitation. Anyway, the pieces are maybe coming together, just very slowly.