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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