LibreELEC 11 lightweight media center Linux distribution based on Kodi 20 “Nexus” has just been released with various improvements on x86 and Arm platforms.
Kodi 20 was released and available for download in January with AV1 hardware video decoding in Android and x86 (VAAPI) platforms with AV1-capable GPU or VPU, FFMPEG 4.4, Pipewire support in Linux, and a few others. LibreELEC 11 enables you to have a dedicated, and fast booting, HTPC based on a mini PC, a Raspberry Pi SBC, or an Arm-based TV box with all features from the latest Kodi release.
LibreELEC 11 supports Raspberry Pi 2 to 4 SBCs, 64-bit x86 hardware, various Allwinner, Rockchip, and Amlogic SBCs and TV boxes with x86, Raspberry Pi, and Rockchip hardware considered more stable and feature complete.
LibreELEC 10.0 did away with Amlogic TV boxes and single board computers because of driver issues, but LibreELEC 11.0 brings Amlogic back but only the older Amlogic S905, S905X/D and S912 systems but hardware based on the new S905X2/D2/Y2, S905X3, S922X, A311D processors are not formally supported because of driver issues meaning 10-bit decoding and 4K video are not working. The old platforms are not perfectly supported either with H.264 working well, but H.265 decoding scoring a 7 out of 10. Amlogic S905X/D and S912 devices support HDR with HEVC/VP9, and Multi-Channel PCM and HDMI audio passthrough up to 7.1 channels. You can still try the new LibreELEC 11.0 on newer Amlogic hardware, but as I understand it, support requests will be mostly ignored.
A long list of Allwinner A64, H3, H5, H6, and R40 boards are supported, but we are told support for the Orange Pi 3 LTS board is still a “work in progress” and there are known problems. Various Rockchip RK3288, RK3328, and RK3399 hardware platforms are supported, and there’s no known problem listed in the announcement. You may have to fiddle with Raspberry Pi’s config.txt for proper 4K support and prevent video audio sync issues when decoding H.264 50/60Hz.
You’ll find the LibreELEC 11.0 images for your hardware on the download page. Note that LibreELEC 10.0 installs will not automatically update, but you can manually migrate to the latest version. Older LibreELEC installs must make a clean install because the Kodi 19 release removed support for Python 2.7 with everything moving to the newer Python 3.x.
Via Liliputing and Phoronix
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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Pity Arm, Linux and LibreElec cannot help, each work together, on fixing the fcuk driver issues.
Use CoreELEC for amlogic.
Yes and there use to be a Russian gaming build to, forget what its called.
Ironically CoreELEC has dropped support for some older chipsets that are now supported again by LibreELEC
It’s ironic how some users would like to use devices just come to market. And there are some users who are using ancient devices 🙂
How is that ironic? I seems like different projects have different goals. CoreELEC seems to be focused more on newer chips (most of the good ones being Amlogic) while LibreELEC is more focused on older chips.
It would be nice if the various Kodi distros worked together, but these are volunteer run projects, they work on what they want to work on. It’s herding cats, you can’t force them to do anything, you can only make tasks more or less enticing. It’s not a simple job to manage.
Well the thing is that the CoreELEC is not focused on just any chipset, but only on AMLogic chipsets.
Straight from their website:
Many people went to CoreELEC in the first place because LibreELEC dropped support for AMLogic devices. They had no alternative. Then, at some point CE dropped support for older hardware, because they couldn’t keep up with too many kernel branches. That is understandable of couse. However, it is very ironic that LE eventually restored support for a platform that even the specialized distro does not longer support.
They do work togther indirectly as basically most distos are based on LibreELEC codebase then they add optimizations and customization on top of that, but the core on most distros is done by LibreELEC’s developers of who many of which is also in Team Kodi working on the core of the Kodi/XBMC application as well.
Ironic that these Pirate Pi clones still don’t run that well. Sinovoip and other crap companies only know how to steal GPL code. Good times for RPi.
RPi is still cringe janky junk. It’s time to return to x86.
You missed the history of the Rpi boards having poor GPU and video decoder support *forever*? Look at this very announcement:
Not only do the rpi boards do a bad job, you can’t even buy them.
Right now, the best supported boards are the Allwinner boards–many of which are made by Sinovoip! Talk about reading comprehension issues. FFS.
I love CoreELEC and still have an S912, for which support was dropped a while back, so this will be interesting to try out to keep it going because it was a beefy SOC when released.
I was hoping that we might have seen an initial build for RK3588 but as the RK builds are based on kernel 6, this might seem unlikely because the RK3588 is currently stuck on 5.1.
Got to give credit where it is due and I suspect that there will be a number of boxes coming out from the mothballs to have new life breathed into them.
I bought an S912 a TV box back in the day. Wanted to run a normal Linux distro. Fail. Sits in original packaging on my shelf. So sad.
For a TV box, the big names are better supported. Real Android TV is better than a hacked tablet version of AOS.