LibreELEC, a minimalist operating system crafted from OpenELEC and built around the Kodi home theatre software, has just received a substantial upgrade to version 12. This significant rollout brings with it compatibility for additional devices and an assortment of fresh features.
Fueled by the enduring Linux 6.6 LTS kernel series and rooted in the most recent Kodi 21 “Omega” media centre program, LibreELEC 12 arrives over an year following LibreELEC 11 and it ushers in support for the Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer.
LibreELEC 12 additionally migrates a considerable number of the supported devices to the 64-bit architecture, which includes Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5. On the subject of Raspberry Pi boards, the fresh LibreELEC launch necessitates the inclusion of either the force_turbo=1 or core_freq_min=500 option in the config.txt to guarantee 50/60fps H.264 HW decoding to ward off AV-sync problems/skipping.
Though the LibreELEC Generic image utilizes the same GBM/V4L2 graphics framework, it extends support to HDR with recent AMD and Intel GPUs. To cap it all, a Generic-legacy image has been rolled out that operates the older X11 graphics stack to ease the process of updating between GBM and X11 images while avoiding complications.
However, the devs inform users that the Generic-legacy image should only be used if you need support for NVIDIA GPUs, the Chrome Browser add-on, or you see graphical glitches on older hardware, e.g. NUC 6th Gen.
“In the last year, NVIDIA has made progress in their support for modern graphics standards. Drivers are now mesa/GBM compatible but still have dependencies on Wayland which we do not use, and Kodi has no plan to support proprietary NVDEC decoding (but VDPAU remains). We still recommend users avoid investing in NVIDIA GPUs,” reads the release announcement page.
Lastly, LibreELEC 12 improves support for Amlogic S905, S905X/D, and S912 devices with new features like H.264 playback and seeking, HEVC playback and seeking, HDR support with HEVC/VP9 media on S905X/D and S912 devices, as well as multi-channel PCM and pass-through audio support on HDMI up to 7.1 channels.
LibreELEC 12 is accessible for immediate download from the official website accommodating an array of devices including Raspberry Pi, Allwinner, Rockchip, Amlogic, and NXP boards, as well as for generic computers using AMD or Intel graphics cards.
Current LibreELEC 11 users will not receive automatic updates to the new release. Thus, users are required to manually update following these instructions. Moreover, users operating on LibreELEC 10 or preceding versions are mandated to perform a clean install due to the Python 3 modifications since Kodi 19.
Additionally, LibreELEC 11 users running Widevine DRM on a 64-bit device will need to reinstall it because of the altered architecture. Note that Widevine DRM is necessary for various copy-protected video streaming add-ons like Prime Video, Netflix, etc.
Image credits: LibreELEC (edited by Marius Nestor)
Last updated 2 hours ago