While most TV boxes and SBCs nowadays ship with or support a version of Android, people who just want the best viewing experience may prefer to switch to a Linux distribution such as LibreELEC or CoreELEC. The good news is that LibreELEC 10.0 has just been released with Kodi 19.1 and Linux 5.10 LTS.
LibreELEC 10.0 is said to work well for Allwinner, Rockchip, and “Generic” Intel/AMD devices, while the Raspberry Pi 4 release’s codebase is rather new, and there may still be a few rough edges. Support for the previous generation Raspberry Pi boards has been dropped, and there’s no support for Amlogic platforms as CoreELEC already provides good support.
Since LibreELEC 10.0 is based on Kodi 19.1, it benefits from the same features as Kodi 19 “Matrix” release including AV1 video decoding, a new skin, HDR support, and more.
LibreELEC 10.1 support a wide range of single board computers, TV boxes, and computers including:
- Allwinner
- Allwinner A64-based boards like Pine A64 or Orange Pi Win
- Plenty of Allwinner H3 platforms with several Orange Pi boards, Banana Pi M2 Plus SBC, Beelink X2 TV Box, etc…
- Allwinner H5 – Just two boards: Orange Pi PC2 and Tritium H5
- Allwinner H6 – Pine H64, several Orange Pi boards, plus Tanix TX6 and Beelink GS1 TV boxes.
- Just one board with Allwinner R40: Banana Pi M2 Ultra
- Rockchip
- Rockchip RK3288-powered boards like ASUS Tinker
- Rockchip RK3328 SBCs and TV boxes including Firefly ROC-RK3328-CC and Popcorn Hour Transformer
- A longer list of Rockchip RK3399 devices such as NanoPi M4, Khadas Edge, Rock Pi 4, Beelink A1 TV box, and many others
- Raspberry Pi – Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi CM4, Raspberry Pi 400 with some limitations as you’ll see below
- x86 image for PCs plus OVA images for virtual machines
The official announcement focuses on what works and what doesn’t on Raspberry Pi 4. Basically, it’s possible to play up to 4Kp30 H.264/H.265 videos with HDR, and Dolby TrueHD & DTS HD HDMI audio pass-through is working fine, but there are several remaining issues, notably with 4Kp50/p60 video output, and the Hyperion Control addon does not work.
Check out the download section to get LibreELEC 10.0 for your hardware.
Thanks to Andreas for the tip.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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My Pi4 is on LibreELEC 9.2.8 and 10.0 hasn’t appeared on the update channel yet. But I’ll probably skip it for a while to see how well it’s working for others.
I guess it’s normal as the announcement says “LibreELEC 9.2 setups will not be automatically updated, you will need to manually update”.
There’s always been some lag time between releases and it appearing on the updater, I shouldn’t have mentioned it.
I don’t care about 4K, so I’ll be looking to see how addons are affected and if there are any other weird issues on Pi4.
There are still a lot of problems with Matrix on the RPi4. I watch live TV and deinterlacing still does not work. I hope this new release solves this problem.
It’s part of the known issues with Raspberry Pi 4 listed in the announcement:
I used to be a real LibreElec/CoreElec/Kodi fan but i finaly gave up a few months ago and switched to JellyFin, Kodi seems to get slower and slower with each release, and i haven’t seen any new features for years.
Kodi is slower in what way? For me the only timing issue which counts is PVR channel switch time which is still good.
And I’m just curious: what features are you missing?
The interface has just gotten so sluggish, menu navigation etc, i liked just using a cec remote but that got more and more frustrating.
Playing all kinds of media has always been pretty good.
Main features i am missing are central server or central database, it has mysql but that doesn’t work between versions, and there is still a lot of stuff that is just put in local sqlite databases that can’t be shared between devices.
Don’t get me wrong i am very thankful for all the hard work they put in to it and had a lot of joy from it in the past.
I found that using a TV remote (CEC) with LibreELEC on Pi4 was more sluggish than using the Bluetooth/whatever remote that comes with Amazon Fire Stick to navigate sideloaded Kodi. Some inherent latency with HDMI-CEC? But you seem to be saying that CEC used to be more responsive.
On rpi3 cec works quite fine, a pity they don’t support it under le10.
So I have to swap my parents pi3 by the beelink x2 then…
I only had a cec issue on the Odroid C1, but that turned out to be badly designed board, other than that cec worked fine, but maby it also depends on the tv and tv remote.
Yeah there was a workaround and it was fixed in the next revision, I remember being super agitated about it back then.
It definitely is slower using CEC but it’s not so slow it’s aggravating, at least not on the C4 or N2/N2+ and I can’t remember if it was ever faster but it does seem like it used to be.
I know on the same TV CEC is about 25-30% faster when using a CCwGTV vs Kodi on CE or OE.
Is it really true that Libreelec provides no support (anymore!) for Amlogic SoCs, a task only left to Coreelec ?
Last time I checked ( 1 year ago) balbes150 thread on Libreelec was quite active providing support for Amlogic SoCs ( and RK andAW SoCs, both “legacy” and NG), not to mention elegant updates for uboot ( balbes150 was also similarly active on Linux Armbian.com, for same SoCs.)
The balbes150 distro was also open (eg you could change the splash screen, etc) while Coreelec locked up after v9.2.6? ( Nov’19.)
Has it fallen on hard times ? Any details?
CoreELEC is also open. And I think splash can also be changed without building own version with v19 version.
A. Can someone confirm that CE K19 version(s) has reverted to unlocked splash, logo etc, as LE seems to not restrict anyway ?
If yes, starting what CE version?
B. Shoog claims that LE is far behind with Amlogic HW decoders.
Is there a good short explanation of why CE might be ahead especially if Amlogic decoders are proprietary ( but RK and AW ones are not ??) ?
C. I am intrigued by chewitt remark on closing balbes150 S9xxx thread saying no progress with video drivers in 2 years.
Is above remark a general problem with move to GBM /Mesa? Where does performance impact start- 720p, 1080p, 4K ( or is resolution irrelevant here?)
The LE team made a conscious decision to use only mainline kernels in their builds. There have been great strides forward in using the Mali graphics engine which does the compositing of the video for the user interface and the final video playback. This is great for the main application which is desktop rendering such as Ubuntu. However that side of things is only a small part of what a media center actually does, all the heavy lifting is performed by hardware decoders which take compressed video’s and uncompress them. Hardware decoders are fast and efficient and put little load on the CPU. Unfortunately the Mainline developers consider these low priority and hard to reverse engineer so they get left till last if at all. As a result the decoding has to be done by the CPU which represents a massive load running the CPU hot and often overloaded. This is the main difference between the CE kernel, which is the propriatory kernel released by AMLogic and includes all the hardware decoders features, and the mainline based LE kernel which doesn’t. Hence the LE implementation will be sluggish, glitchy and run the CPU super hot.
Here is the critical take home message, for the end user their is literally no benefit in using a partially functioning Mainline kernel over the propitiatory AMLogic kernel – all you will see is reduced performance.
Thank you.
Short and relevant !
I wonder then if AW+ RK also has the same CPU soft-decode problems with LE.
What Linux kernel is CE running now?
Now hopefully the CE K19 revert to open splash/logo question will be answered too …
Linux 4.9.113
oemsplash has small bug and will be fixed in next nightly build where it will work again
Ok so I see this last Aug’21 comment:
https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/12330-balbes150-le-images-with-kodi-19-for-s9xxx/?pageNo=94
This implies balbes150 (Oleg) has stopped work on Amlogic ( last versions on his Yandex repo as of July’21), while chewitt is on a long break.
But chewitt official Amlogic images for Kodi 19 also seem available.
Hopefully both image types are still open ?!
Looks like there isn’t much left to develop for Kodi or Amlogic SoCs given the slow pace of video drivers updates !
Many of the essential hardware decoders are simply not supported in Mainline Linux and as such the Amlogic SoC support is very subpar on LE, this will remain so until the Linux kernel team reverse engineer them – which maybe never.
I know this was 4 months ago but great strides have been made since then for LE on Amlogic, chewitt had put a ton of work into it.
It’s good news for any owners of supported boxes and things do certainly work well on X86.
As far as AV1 decoding goes, it is good that Kodi supports it although for hardware decoding I’m not sure if any of the boxes mentioned support it natively.
CoreELEC works very well on many an AMLogic box and in time I am sure that the 5.10 kernel will become part of it.
I hope that the Pi foundation will get things right with the next iteration as it’s very poor that despite providing not 1 but 2 4K HDMI ports, 4K playback is still so problematic.