LibreELEC is a non-profit fork of OpenELEC
It was recently announced release of the new version of LibreELEC 10.0.4, which brings Kodi (Matrix) 19.5 and despite the small version jump, the new version of the LibreELEC media distribution center brings some changes that are worth mentioning.
For those who are unaware of LibreELEC, they should know that unfolds as a distribution for the creation of home theaters and that is a fork of OpenELEC where the user interface is based on the Kodi media center.
The basic principle of the "everything just works" distribution, for a completely ready-to-work environment. The user does not have to worry about keeping the system up-to-date: the distribution kit uses a system to automatically download and install updates, which is activated when connected to the global network.
It is possible to extend the functionality of the distribution through the system of add-ons that are installed from a separate repository developed by the project developers.
The distribution does not use the base package of other distributions and it is based on its own developments. In addition to the usual features of Kodi, the distribution kit provides a number of additional functions aimed at maximum simplification of work.
LibreELEC 10.0.4 main news
The new version of LibreELEC 10.0.4 arrives based on Kodi 19.5 and updated firmware is included for the different models of the Raspberry Pi boards, as well as fixes related to running on systems with AMD GPUs.
It is worth mentioning that this version of LibreELEC 10.0.4 they no longer provide their own images for the first generation of Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Zero. According to the corresponding announcement, the support has expired and the performance is not enough for smooth video playback.
In a Raspberry Pi 2 or 3, the new video pipeline in LibreELEC 10 does not yet support accelerated playback by HEVC video hardware.
On the part of the RPi 4 and Raspberry Pi 400 it is mentioned that with this new version of LibreELEC the 4K video output via HDMI output, hardware accelerated decoding of H264 and H265 material, HDR video display in HDR10 and HLG formats, 10 and 12 bit image output and hardware assisted deinterlacing of SD material, such as from a DVD and also if the user wishes, LibreELEC forwards audio in Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD formats to other connected devices.
Finally, LibreELEC 10.0.4 has new firmware for compatible Raspberry Pis and fixes some issues with AMD graphics cards.
Finally it is worth taking into account that the development team mentions that the new version does not support direct upgrade from LibreELEC 9.2 to LibreELEC 10.0 due to Python changes with Kodi addons.
We strongly advise users to create a backup BEFORE creating a clean install of LibreELEC 10.x, as the older version (which Kodi has never supported) is basically impossible.
If you want to know more about this release, you can check the details in the original publication In the following link.
How to get LibreELEC 10.0.4?
For those interested in being able to try the new version, you should know that it is already available in its new system images for the Raspberry Pi 4, Allwinner, Generic and Rockchip mini PCs with ARM SoC and the x86 architecture with 64 bits (x86_64).
You can obtain any of the available images by going to the official website of the project and in its download section you will get the picture of it.The link is this.
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.
Another tool that you can use to burn the image to your SD is LibreELEC USB-SD Creator which is available for Windows, macOS and Linux.
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.