OpenELEC - Media Center Operating System

  The OpenELEC team is proud to release the second release candidate of OpenELEC 2.0! Internally this is known by the less-catchy name OpenELEC 1.99.2 :) and we really hope again its one of the latest prereleases before our OpenELEC 2.0 final.   ... [More] Our first Release Candidate showed us an issue with our Autoupdater which should be solved now. This new Release Candidate also fixes issues with Airplay support, RTMP support, CEC support and updates and fixes VDPAU and XVBA support.     Starting with RC1 we switched to PVR builds. Users who are switching from a older non PVR build to our new builds must start with a fresh XBMC config. You can do this via ssh (putty). To backup your old config: cp -R /storage/.xbmc /storage/.xbmc.bk To remove the old config (XBMC must be configured from scratch, including any addons/databases) rm -rf /storage/.xbmc Because we have included the AMD legacy driver in our Generic builds with Beta 6 its needed for all users of this builds to check the partition size of the first partition. This builds are now around 165MB. You can do this via ssh (putty): df -h /flash Starting with Beta 4 we also checked for corrupt update files before upgrading commences. On very rare occasions the download of our updates were incomplete and caused the system to fail after reboot. As our user base grows, rarer problems such as this one will emerge and be dealt with in a similar manner. This change will reduce the number of upgrades problems.To manually update the procedure is the same as before however you must also copy KERNEL.md5 and SYSTEM.md5 to the update folder/share together with KERNEL and SYSTEM.   There are 36 changes by 2 authors and 15 closed issues since RC1 (1.99.1). The most important changes are: update to libcec-2.0.0 update to xf86-video-fglrx-12.9 add backports for VDPAU and XVBA   We would like to thank our users, team members and partners for testing, reporting and fixing issues, creating how-to documents, developing new features, and their donations of hardware and funds to the project. We appreciate your continued support! How can I make a donation? If you want to contribute to the OpenELEC project, you can make a donation using PayPal. Donating is easy, takes only a few minutes and you do not need a PayPal account to make a donation. We have not set up our PayPal donation page to suggest a donation amount; please just donate what you feel comfortable with. You can download your OpenELEC 2.0 RC 2 build here. Upgrading to OpenELEC 1.99.2 There have been many months of developer testing in the run-up to this beta release, but like any major update there are a lot of changes and something somewhere will have been missed (this is why we do beta tests). If you are going to update to the beta release from our actual stable OpenELEC-1.0 we STRONGLY advise you to make a backup of XBMC’s data files first and start with a fresh XBMC user dir: mv /storage/.xbmc /storage/.xbmc-backup   If you are going to update from a previous OpenELEC-2.0 beta you can use our automatic method.   New OpenELEC WikiWe have added a wiki on http://wiki.openelec.tv to replace various HOWTO and “Tips & Tricks” sections of the website and forums. If you previously created popular forum articles for us please help us by moving them to the wiki.   Issue Reports & Feature Requests on githubOpenELEC gained many new users since 1.0 and it became impossible to track issue reports and feature requests via forum postings. To re-assert some control and improve visibility for the dev team we have moved all bug reporting and feature requests to the github issue tracker here: http://github.com/OpenELEC/OpenELEC.tv/issues . This is one of our last calls to report critical OpenELEC-2.0 bugs!   OpenELEC 2.0 highlights and changes: XBMC-11.0 (Eden)Includes new native high-performance image compression for JPEG and PNG image types. If you previously enabled DDS fanart in advancedsettings.xml it should be removed. You can remove .dds files from the thumbnail image cache.Eden has improved sound card detection. This may change the naming of audio devices available on your system. If audio stops working after the update please adjust audio configuration in XBMC settings to use the updated device names.   PVR SupportBased on XBMC 11.0 but include PVR support within the XBMC GUI and include DVB firmware and drivers, TVHeadend, VDR, Njoy N7 and VU+ support in the OS.   PXE netboot support: booting over NFS support (wiki article needed) booting over NBD support (wiki article needed) booting over iSCSI support Airplay and Airtunes support   CEC Adapter support   libaacs support exFAT support   Automatic framebuffer detectionThe previous “hack” to make splash screens work should be removed else you will see a message saying the video mode is not supported. Mount /flash read/write with “mount -o remount,rw /flash” and edit /flash/extlinux.conf. Remove vga=XYZ from the APPEND line, then save and reboot.   New “Generic_OSS” image“Generic_OSS” is similar to “Generic” but contains the open source AMD and nVidia graphic drivers. If you need to install OpenELEC to a system with older AMD or nVidia graphics cards and the “Generic” image doesn’t work, try this image.   “Fusion” image is now 64bitOpenELEC 1.x was 32bit due to issues in the 64bit build. These issues are fixed so we have switched to 64bit to make best use of Fusion hardware capabilities. Existing 32bit binary addons are not compatible with a 64bit OS so we recommend a clean installation to prevent issues. If you prefer to perform a manual update; you will need to remove all OpenELEC 32bit addon packages, update the OS, then re-add addon packages to get compatible 64bit versions. Please back-up /storage/.xbmc first! cp -a /storage/.xbmc /storage/.xbmc-backuprm -rf /storage/.xbmc/addons/packagesrm -rf /home/.xbmc/userdata/Database/Addons*.dbreboot, then reinstall the addons you need Automatic Log-File CreationAccessing the \\OPENELEC\Logfiles SAMBA share automatically creates an archive file that contains essential log-files for troubleshooting.   Improved AMD XVBA supportThanks to the efforts of FernetMenta, Fritsch, Newphreak and many users who have been testing and providing feedback we have native XVBA support that replaces the old VAAPI solution in OpenELEC 1.x. Perfomance and stability are massively improved.   AppleTV builds use nVidia graphics (with full support for HDMI audio)Thanks to chewitt and XBMC’s Scott Davilla working with nVidia the long-standing HDMI audio bug was fixed. The nVidia driver brings a HUGE improvement to video quality and performance in our AppleTV image.   Llano A support removed from Fusion buildsTo optimise Fusion builds for AMD Fusion HTPCs we removed Llano “A” support from Fusion builds. If you have a Llano “A” system please use the “Generic” image.   SSH is OFF by defaultTo improve “out of the box” security SSH is disabled by default. It can be enabled as part of the install process if required. It can be enabled post-install by adding an “ssh_enable” file to the \\OPENELEC\Configfiles SAMBA share and rebooting, or by adding “ssh” to the APPEND line in /flash/extlinux.cfg   PS3 controller support has been moved to a separate addon   Wii controller support has been moved to a separate addon   XBMC now includes native NFS, AFP ,CIFS  and SSH share supportso netmount.conf has been removed. If you still need the old functionality please read http://openelec.tv/forum/76-network-filesystems/11391-netmountconf-is-ditched-in-new-eden-how-to-set-sambacifs-shares?limit=20&start=180#29027   [Less]

  The OpenELEC team is proud to release the first release candidate of OpenELEC 2.0! Internally this is known by the less-catchy name OpenELEC 1.99.1 :) and we really hope its one of the latest prereleases before our OpenELEC 2.0 final. After ... [More] the XBMC Devcon in Vienna 5 weeks ago the PVR sub-projects have now been formally accepted into the XBMC master branch. Because of this and to save us a lot of additional work we have decided to drop the non PVR builds completly starting with this release candidate. Going forward all OpenELEC images will be PVR ready – the PVR functions can simply be enabled (or disabled) in XBMC settings. An unofficial blog of the Vienna discussions can be read here: http://xbmc.us To learn more about XBMC’s PVR capabilities please read here: http://xbmc.org/pvr   After the release of OpenELEC Beta 7 we received  new bug reports. Most of them should be fixed now.   Users who are switching from a older non PVR build to our new builds must start with a fresh XBMC config. You can do this via ssh (putty). To backup your old config: cp -R /storage/.xbmc /storage/.xbmc.bk To remove the old config (XBMC must be configured from scratch, including any addons/databases) rm -rf /storage/.xbmc Because we have included the AMD legacy driver in our Generic builds with Beta 6 its needed for all users of this builds to check the partition size of the first partition. This builds are now around 165MB. You can do this via ssh (putty): df -h /flash Starting with Beta 4 we also checked for corrupt update files before upgrading commences. On very rare occasions the download of our updates were incomplete and caused the system to fail after reboot. As our user base grows, rarer problems such as this one will emerge and be dealt with in a similar manner. This change will reduce the number of upgrades problems.To manually update the procedure is the same as before however you must also copy KERNEL.md5 and SYSTEM.md5 to the update folder/share together with KERNEL and SYSTEM.   There are 215 changes by 11 authors and 100 closed issues since Beta 7 (1.95.7). The most important changes are: update to linux-3.2.30 update to connman-1.7 update to systemd-194 update broken music/musicvideo scrapers update to xorg-server-1.12.4 update to xf86-video-intel-2.20.9 update to libaacs-0.5.0 update to libbluray-0.2.3 downgrade to xf86-video-fglrx-12.6 update to libcec-1.9.0 update to kmod-10 update to libvdpau-0.5 update to util-linux-2.22 update to alsa-lib-1.0.26 update to ffmpeg-0.10.5 update to gcc-4.7.2 add backports for VDPAU and XVBA   We would like to thank our users, team members and partners for testing, reporting and fixing issues, creating how-to documents, developing new features, and their donations of hardware and funds to the project. We appreciate your continued support! How can I make a donation? If you want to contribute to the OpenELEC project, you can make a donation using PayPal. Donating is easy, takes only a few minutes and you do not need a PayPal account to make a donation. We have not set up our PayPal donation page to suggest a donation amount; please just donate what you feel comfortable with. You can download your OpenELEC 2.0 RC 1 build here. Upgrading to OpenELEC 1.99.1 There have been many months of developer testing in the run-up to this beta release, but like any major update there are a lot of changes and something somewhere will have been missed (this is why we do beta tests). If you are going to update to the beta release from our actual stable OpenELEC-1.0 we STRONGLY advise you to make a backup of XBMC’s data files first and start with a fresh XBMC user dir: mv /storage/.xbmc /storage/.xbmc-backup   If you are going to update from a previous OpenELEC-2.0 beta you can use our automatic method.   New OpenELEC WikiWe have added a wiki on http://wiki.openelec.tv to replace various HOWTO and “Tips & Tricks” sections of the website and forums. If you previously created popular forum articles for us please help us by moving them to the wiki.   Issue Reports & Feature Requests on githubOpenELEC gained many new users since 1.0 and it became impossible to track issue reports and feature requests via forum postings. To re-assert some control and improve visibility for the dev team we have moved all bug reporting and feature requests to the github issue tracker here: http://github.com/OpenELEC/OpenELEC.tv/issues . This is one of our last calls to report critical OpenELEC-2.0 bugs!   OpenELEC 2.0 highlights and changes: XBMC-11.0 (Eden)Includes new native high-performance image compression for JPEG and PNG image types. If you previously enabled DDS fanart in advancedsettings.xml it should be removed. You can remove .dds files from the thumbnail image cache.Eden has improved sound card detection. This may change the naming of audio devices available on your system. If audio stops working after the update please adjust audio configuration in XBMC settings to use the updated device names.   PVR SupportBased on XBMC 11.0 but include PVR support within the XBMC GUI and include DVB firmware and drivers, TVHeadend, VDR, Njoy N7 and VU+ support in the OS.   PXE netboot support: booting over NFS support (wiki article needed) booting over NBD support (wiki article needed) booting over iSCSI support Airplay and Airtunes support   CEC Adapter support   libaacs support exFAT support   Automatic framebuffer detectionThe previous “hack” to make splash screens work should be removed else you will see a message saying the video mode is not supported. Mount /flash read/write with “mount -o remount,rw /flash” and edit /flash/extlinux.conf. Remove vga=XYZ from the APPEND line, then save and reboot.   New “Generic_OSS” image“Generic_OSS” is similar to “Generic” but contains the open source AMD and nVidia graphic drivers. If you need to install OpenELEC to a system with older AMD or nVidia graphics cards and the “Generic” image doesn’t work, try this image.   “Fusion” image is now 64bitOpenELEC 1.x was 32bit due to issues in the 64bit build. These issues are fixed so we have switched to 64bit to make best use of Fusion hardware capabilities. Existing 32bit binary addons are not compatible with a 64bit OS so we recommend a clean installation to prevent issues. If you prefer to perform a manual update; you will need to remove all OpenELEC 32bit addon packages, update the OS, then re-add addon packages to get compatible 64bit versions. Please back-up /storage/.xbmc first! cp -a /storage/.xbmc /storage/.xbmc-backuprm -rf /storage/.xbmc/addons/packagesrm -rf /home/.xbmc/userdata/Database/Addons*.dbreboot, then reinstall the addons you need Automatic Log-File CreationAccessing the \\OPENELEC\Logfiles SAMBA share automatically creates an archive file that contains essential log-files for troubleshooting.   Improved AMD XVBA supportThanks to the efforts of FernetMenta, Fritsch, Newphreak and many users who have been testing and providing feedback we have native XVBA support that replaces the old VAAPI solution in OpenELEC 1.x. Perfomance and stability are massively improved.   AppleTV builds use nVidia graphics (with full support for HDMI audio)Thanks to chewitt and XBMC’s Scott Davilla working with nVidia the long-standing HDMI audio bug was fixed. The nVidia driver brings a HUGE improvement to video quality and performance in our AppleTV image.   Llano A support removed from Fusion buildsTo optimise Fusion builds for AMD Fusion HTPCs we removed Llano “A” support from Fusion builds. If you have a Llano “A” system please use the “Generic” image.   SSH is OFF by defaultTo improve “out of the box” security SSH is disabled by default. It can be enabled as part of the install process if required. It can be enabled post-install by adding an “ssh_enable” file to the \\OPENELEC\Configfiles SAMBA share and rebooting, or by adding “ssh” to the APPEND line in /flash/extlinux.cfg   PS3 controller support has been moved to a separate addon   Wii controller support has been moved to a separate addon   XBMC now includes native NFS, AFP ,CIFS  and SSH share supportso netmount.conf has been removed. If you still need the old functionality please read http://openelec.tv/forum/76-network-filesystems/11391-netmountconf-is-ditched-in-new-eden-how-to-set-sambacifs-shares?limit=20&start=180#29027   UPDATE (05.10.2012): The autoupdate function in older builds (1.95.x) is broken and dont update to our RC's (1.99.x). We work on a fix. Until its fixed please download and update manually. See: http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title=Updating_OpenELEC sorry! [Less]

It’s been a while since we posted some project news so we thought we would share an update from the recent XBMC DevCon session in Vienna and let you know about several important changes that have been made!   XBMC DevCon 2012 - Vienna OpenELEC’s ... [More] founder and lead developer Stephan Raue joined the XBMC team approximately two years ago, and having an insiders view of the XBMC project and working directly with their core developers has helped to bring XBMC and the OpenELEC OS platform much closer together. Stephan recently joined other XBMC team members at the DevCon event in Vienna to discuss the progress and direction of XBMC. OpenELEC was an item on the agenda and Stephan was able to highlight the value OpenELEC provides to many thousands of users by embedding XBMC into a lightweight and fast “appliance” style operating system. The XBMC team gave a full endorsement to OpenELEC and in the long-term we can expect greater direct cooperation and support from XBMC’s developers to advance OpenELEC's capabilities.An unofficial blog of the Vienna discussions can be read here: http://xbmc.us PVR and RPi Merged to XBMC Master Since the XBMC 11.0 (Eden) release in March there have been several significant changes to the XBMC codebase. The PVR sub-project and the ARM port for the Raspberry Pi have been important to many XBMC and OpenELEC users and are consistently two of the hottest trending topics in the OpenELEC forums. We are pleased to announce that the PVR and RPi sub-projects have now been formally accepted into the XBMC master branch.Although they have been merged to the main XBMC codebase these are still young additions to XBMC and we can expect them to contain a few undocumented “features” (aka bugs!) that will need to be discovered and fixed. Please make sure any PVR and RPi related XBMC issues you encounter are reported to the XBMC “trac” bug database: http://trac.xbmc.org. The OpenELEC team would like to send special thanks to Lars Op den Kamp and Edgar (Gimli) Huceke (and the many others who helped them) for their respective work on PVR and Raspberry Pi support :-)The inclusion of PVR into XBMC master means we can also save some build cycles and reduce PVR related confusion over which OpenELEC image to download in the future. Going forward all OpenELEC images will be PVR ready – the PVR functions can simply be enabled (or disabled) in XBMC settings.To learn more about XBMC’s PVR capabilities please read here: http://xbmc.org/pvr MPEG-2 and VC-1 on RaspberryPi Two weeks ago the Raspberry Pi Foundation made many people happy when they announced “big improvements” to MPEG-2 and VC-1 decoding on the RPi platform. Support for both codecs was previously impossible, but licenses to use them can now be purchased (MPEG2, VC1) from the foundation. OpenELEC had advance knowledge of this development so the required changes were fully implemented and ready for the public announcement. MPEG-2 and VC-1 are widely used with streaming media so ARM’d [sic] with these license upgrades the RPi platform will be able to support XBMC’s new PVR functions.To read more on this subject please read here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1839To learn how to install your licenses with OpenELEC please read the wiki here: http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title=RaspberryPi_adding_Codecs (to be created) How can I make a donation? If you want to contribute to the OpenELEC project, you can make a donation using PayPal. Donating is easy, takes only a few minutes and you do not need a PayPal account to make a donation. We have not set up our PayPal donation page to suggest a donation amount; please just donate what you feel comfortable with. PVR support for Raspberry Pi Last but not least: the result of all above news is working PVR support for RaspberryPi on OpenELEC. If you want test these builds you can grab your copy at http://sources.openelec.tv/tmp/image/openelec-rpi/ (all builds after r11904). (Note: This builds includes a reworked RaspberryPi support and are development builds and can still contain bugs and issues, there is no stable XBMC release for RPi this time! To report issues use XBMC's Trac for XBMC issues and OpenELEC's github issue tracker for OS related bugs) HTS-TVHeadend as a backend PVR server can be installed via XBMC's addon system: System/Settings/Add-ons/Services/hts-tvheadend   Screenshot made by fritsch Please stay tuned for our next news item :)   [Less]

It’s been a while since we posted some project news so we thought we would share an update from the recent XBMC DevCon session in Vienna and let you know about several important changes that have been made!

  The OpenELEC team is proud to release the 7th beta of OpenELEC 2.0! Internally this is known by the less-catchy name OpenELEC 1.95.7 :)   After the release of OpenELEC Beta 6 we received  new bug reports regarding non working Samba shares and ... [More] Network related problems. Most of them should be fixed now.     Because we have included the AMD legacy driver in our Generic builds with Beta 6 its needed for all users of this builds to check the partition size of the first partition. This builds are now around 165MB. You can do this via ssh (putty):   df -h /flash     Starting with Beta 4 we also checked for corrupt update files before upgrading commences. On very rare occasions the download of our updates were incomplete and caused the system to fail after reboot. As our user base grows, rarer problems such as this one will emerge and be dealt with in a similar manner. This change will reduce the number of upgrades problems.To manually update the procedure is the same as before however you must also copy KERNEL.md5 and SYSTEM.md5 to the update folder/share together with KERNEL and SYSTEM.   There are 41 changes by 4 authors and 40 closed issues since Beta 6 (1.95.6). The most important changes are: update to linux-3.2.28 update to samba-3.6.7 update to connman-1.5 fix (again) the not working Samba start on some platforms fix the "Watermark" issue with more AMD legacy GPUs fix network and networkboot problems   We would like to thank our users, team members and partners for testing, reporting and fixing issues, creating how-to documents, developing new features, and their donations of hardware and funds to the project. We appreciate your continued support! How can I make a donation? If you want to contribute to the OpenELEC project, you can make a donation using PayPal. Donating is easy, takes only a few minutes and you do not need a PayPal account to make a donation. We have not set up our PayPal donation page to suggest a donation amount; please just donate what you feel comfortable with. You can download your OpenELEC 2.0 Beta 7 build here. Upgrading to OpenELEC 1.95.7 There have been many months of developer testing in the run-up to this beta release, but like any major update there are a lot of changes and something somewhere will have been missed (this is why we do beta tests). If you are going to update to the beta release from our actual stable OpenELEC-1.0 we STRONGLY advise you to make a backup of XBMC’s data files first and start with a fresh XBMC user dir: mv /storage/.xbmc /storage/.xbmc-backup   If you are going to update from a previous OpenELEC-2.0 beta you can use our automatic method.   New OpenELEC WikiWe have added a wiki on http://wiki.openelec.tv to replace various HOWTO and “Tips & Tricks” sections of the website and forums. If you previously created popular forum articles for us please help us by moving them to the wiki.   Issue Reports & Feature Requests on githubOpenELEC gained many new users since 1.0 and it became impossible to track issue reports and feature requests via forum postings. To re-assert some control and improve visibility for the dev team we have moved all bug reporting and feature requests to the github issue tracker here: http://github.com/OpenELEC/OpenELEC.tv/issues . This is one of our last calls to report critical OpenELEC-2.0 bugs!   OpenELEC 2.0 highlights and changes: XBMC-11.0 (Eden)Includes new native high-performance image compression for JPEG and PNG image types. If you previously enabled DDS fanart in advancedsettings.xml it should be removed. You can remove .dds files from the thumbnail image cache.Eden has improved sound card detection. This may change the naming of audio devices available on your system. If audio stops working after the update please adjust audio configuration in XBMC settings to use the updated device names.   XBMC-PVR buildsThese builds are based on XBMC 11.0 but include PVR support within the XBMC GUI and include DVB firmware and drivers, TVHeadend, VDR and VU+ support in the OS.   PXE netboot support: booting over NFS support (wiki article needed) booting over NBD support (wiki article needed) booting over iSCSI support Airplay and Airtunes support   CEC Adapter support   libaacs support exFAT support   Automatic framebuffer detectionThe previous “hack” to make splash screens work should be removed else you will see a message saying the video mode is not supported. Mount /flash read/write with “mount -o remount,rw /flash” and edit /flash/extlinux.conf. Remove vga=XYZ from the APPEND line, then save and reboot.   New “Generic_OSS” image“Generic_OSS” is similar to “Generic” but contains the open source AMD and nVidia graphic drivers. If you need to install OpenELEC to a system with older AMD or nVidia graphics cards and the “Generic” image doesn’t work, try this image.   “Fusion” image is now 64bitOpenELEC 1.x was 32bit due to issues in the 64bit build. These issues are fixed so we have switched to 64bit to make best use of Fusion hardware capabilities. Existing 32bit binary addons are not compatible with a 64bit OS so we recommend a clean installation to prevent issues. If you prefer to perform a manual update; you will need to remove all OpenELEC 32bit addon packages, update the OS, then re-add addon packages to get compatible 64bit versions. Please back-up /storage/.xbmc first! cp -a /storage/.xbmc /storage/.xbmc-backuprm -rf /storage/.xbmc/addons/packagesrm -rf /home/.xbmc/userdata/Database/Addons*.dbreboot, then reinstall the addons you need Automatic Log-File CreationAccessing the \\OPENELEC\Logfiles SAMBA share automatically creates an archive file that contains essential log-files for troubleshooting.   Improved AMD XVBA supportThanks to the efforts of FernetMenta, Fritsch, Newphreak and many users who have been testing and providing feedback we have native XVBA support that replaces the old VAAPI solution in OpenELEC 1.x. Perfomance and stability are massively improved.   AppleTV builds use nVidia graphics (with full support for HDMI audio)Thanks to chewitt and XBMC’s Scott Davilla working with nVidia the long-standing HDMI audio bug was fixed. The nVidia driver brings a HUGE improvement to video quality and performance in our AppleTV image.   Llano A support removed from Fusion buildsTo optimise Fusion builds for AMD Fusion HTPCs we removed Llano “A” support from Fusion builds. If you have a Llano “A” system please use the “Generic” image.   SSH is OFF by defaultTo improve “out of the box” security SSH is disabled by default. It can be enabled as part of the install process if required. It can be enabled post-install by adding an “ssh_enable” file to the \\OPENELEC\Configfiles SAMBA share and rebooting, or by adding “ssh” to the APPEND line in /flash/extlinux.cfg   PS3 controller support has been moved to a separate addon   Wii controller support has been moved to a separate addon   XBMC now includes native NFS, AFP ,CIFS  and SSH share supportso netmount.conf has been removed. If you still need the old functionality please read http://openelec.tv/forum/76-network-filesystems/11391-netmountconf-is-ditched-in-new-eden-how-to-set-sambacifs-shares?limit=20&start=180#29027   [Less]

The guys at fanart.tv wrote a small past and present story about how it all began and what they do now days. Fanart.tv is a site which hosts some amazing artwork that is used throughout all XBMC skins in some way or another. From albums covers ... [More] , tvshow and movie logos to spinning music and movies discs. They provide it all for free. This is all done by volunteers who dedicate their free time so other people can enjoy a great XBMC media center experience. If you are curious on how it all started you can read the full story here. Like to know how all these images can be used? They will show us next time with some nice screen shots taken from the best XBMC skins out there - so stay tuned. [Less]

The guys at fanart.tv wrote a small past and present story about how it all began and what they do now days. Fanart.tv is a site which hosts some amazing artwork that is used throughout all XBMC skins in some way or another. From albums covers, tvshow and movie logos to spinning music and movies discs.

The guys at fanart.tv wrote a small past and present story about how it all began and what they do now days. Fanart.tv is a site which hosts some amazing artwork that is used throughout all XBMC skins in some way or another. From albums covers, tvshow and movie logos to spinning music and movies discs.

The guys at fanart.tv wrote a small past and present story about how it all began and what they do now days. Fanart.tv is a site which hosts some amazing artwork that is used throughout all XBMC skins in some way or another. From albums covers, tvshow and movie logos to spinning music and movies discs.

  The OpenELEC team is proud to release the 6th beta of OpenELEC 2.0! Internally this is known by the less-catchy name OpenELEC 1.95.6 :)   After the release of OpenELEC Beta 5 we received again many new bug reports. Some or most of the Issues ... [More] related to a not starting SAMBA server and not working video output on older AMD graphic cards and GPUs introduced by a AMD video driver update and the removing for support for legacy GPUs (HD2xxx-HD4xxx). We have added the legacy AMD driver to our Generic builds which should work now, but also needs to be more tested. A known reported issue with this driver is a Watermark on some GPUs. As these are significant changes and to be sure we have solved most of the reported issues we have decided to release Beta 6 :-). Because we have included the AMD legacy driver in our Generic builds its needed for all users of this builds to check the partition size of the first partition. This builds are now around 165MB. You can do this via ssh (putty): df -h /flash Starting with Beta 4 we also checked for corrupt update files before upgrading commences. On very rare occasions the download of our updates were incomplete and caused the system to fail after reboot. As our user base grows, rarer problems such as this one will emerge and be dealt with in a similar manner. This change will reduce the number of upgrades problems. To manually update the procedure is the same as before however you must also copy KERNEL.md5 and SYSTEM.md5 to the update folder/share together with KERNEL and SYSTEM. There are 290 changes by 15 authors and 85 closed issues since Beta 5 (1.95.5). The most important changes are: update to linux-3.2.26 add package xf86-video-fglrx-legacy enable LTO support and size optimizations for all projects update to xorg-server-1.12.3 update to Mesa-8.0.4 fix suspend/wakeup issues on some projects update to xf86-video-intel-2.20.3 update to xf-86-video-nvidia-295.71 update to libcec-1.8.0 update to connman-1.4 add package RTL8192CU   We would like to thank our users, team members and partners for testing, reporting and fixing issues, creating how-to documents, developing new features, and their donations of hardware and funds to the project. We appreciate your continued support! How can I make a donation? If you want to contribute to the OpenELEC project, you can make a donation using PayPal. Donating is easy, takes only a few minutes and you do not need a PayPal account to make a donation. We have not set up our PayPal donation page to suggest a donation amount; please just donate what you feel comfortable with. You can download your OpenELEC 2.0 Beta 6 build here. Upgrading to OpenELEC 1.95.6 There have been many months of developer testing in the run-up to this beta release, but like any major update there are a lot of changes and something somewhere will have been missed (this is why we do beta tests). If you are going to update to the beta release from our actual stable OpenELEC-1.0 we STRONGLY advise you to make a backup of XBMC’s data files first and start with a fresh XBMC user dir: mv /storage/.xbmc /storage/.xbmc-backup   If you are going to update from a previous OpenELEC-2.0 beta you can use our automatic method.   New OpenELEC WikiWe have added a wiki on http://wiki.openelec.tv to replace various HOWTO and “Tips & Tricks” sections of the website and forums. If you previously created popular forum articles for us please help us by moving them to the wiki.   Issue Reports & Feature Requests on githubOpenELEC gained many new users since 1.0 and it became impossible to track issue reports and feature requests via forum postings. To re-assert some control and improve visibility for the dev team we have moved all bug reporting and feature requests to the github issue tracker here: http://github.com/OpenELEC/OpenELEC.tv/issues . This is one of our last calls to report critical OpenELEC-2.0 bugs!   OpenELEC 2.0 highlights and changes: XBMC-11.0 (Eden)Includes new native high-performance image compression for JPEG and PNG image types. If you previously enabled DDS fanart in advancedsettings.xml it should be removed. You can remove .dds files from the thumbnail image cache.Eden has improved sound card detection. This may change the naming of audio devices available on your system. If audio stops working after the update please adjust audio configuration in XBMC settings to use the updated device names.   XBMC-PVR buildsThese builds are based on XBMC 11.0 but include PVR support within the XBMC GUI and include DVB firmware and drivers, TVHeadend, VDR and VU+ support in the OS.   PXE netboot support: booting over NFS support (wiki article needed) booting over NBD support (wiki article needed) booting over iSCSI support Airplay and Airtunes support   CEC Adapter support   libaacs support exFAT support   Automatic framebuffer detectionThe previous “hack” to make splash screens work should be removed else you will see a message saying the video mode is not supported. Mount /flash read/write with “mount -o remount,rw /flash” and edit /flash/extlinux.conf. Remove vga=XYZ from the APPEND line, then save and reboot.   New “Generic_OSS” image“Generic_OSS” is similar to “Generic” but contains the open source AMD and nVidia graphic drivers. If you need to install OpenELEC to a system with older AMD or nVidia graphics cards and the “Generic” image doesn’t work, try this image.   “Fusion” image is now 64bitOpenELEC 1.x was 32bit due to issues in the 64bit build. These issues are fixed so we have switched to 64bit to make best use of Fusion hardware capabilities. Existing 32bit binary addons are not compatible with a 64bit OS so we recommend a clean installation to prevent issues. If you prefer to perform a manual update; you will need to remove all OpenELEC 32bit addon packages, update the OS, then re-add addon packages to get compatible 64bit versions. Please back-up /storage/.xbmc first! cp -a /storage/.xbmc /storage/.xbmc-backuprm -rf /storage/.xbmc/addons/packagesrm -rf /home/.xbmc/userdata/Database/Addons*.dbreboot, then reinstall the addons you need Automatic Log-File CreationAccessing the \\OPENELEC\Logfiles SAMBA share automatically creates an archive file that contains essential log-files for troubleshooting.   Improved AMD XVBA supportThanks to the efforts of FernetMenta, Fritsch, Newphreak and many users who have been testing and providing feedback we have native XVBA support that replaces the old VAAPI solution in OpenELEC 1.x. Perfomance and stability are massively improved.   AppleTV builds use nVidia graphics (with full support for HDMI audio)Thanks to chewitt and XBMC’s Scott Davilla working with nVidia the long-standing HDMI audio bug was fixed. The nVidia driver brings a HUGE improvement to video quality and performance in our AppleTV image.   Llano A support removed from Fusion buildsTo optimise Fusion builds for AMD Fusion HTPCs we removed Llano “A” support from Fusion builds. If you have a Llano “A” system please use the “Generic” image.   SSH is OFF by defaultTo improve “out of the box” security SSH is disabled by default. It can be enabled as part of the install process if required. It can be enabled post-install by adding an “ssh_enable” file to the \\OPENELEC\Configfiles SAMBA share and rebooting, or by adding “ssh” to the APPEND line in /flash/extlinux.cfg   PS3 controller support has been moved to a separate addon   Wii controller support has been moved to a separate addon   XBMC now includes native NFS, AFP ,CIFS  and SSH share supportso netmount.conf has been removed. If you still need the old functionality please read http://openelec.tv/forum/76-network-filesystems/11391-netmountconf-is-ditched-in-new-eden-how-to-set-sambacifs-shares?limit=20&start=180#29027   [Less]