LibreELEC is ‘Just enough OS’ for Kodi, a Linux distribution built to run Kodi on current and popular mediacentre hardware. We are an evolution of the popular OpenELEC project. LibreELEC software will be familiar to OpenELEC users, but the project follows its own path and has intentional differences:
LibreELEC is governed by a project board elected from active team members to set project goals, priorities, and take executive decisions. The board ensures project tasks are distributed among volunteers; we operate on the principle of “many hands make light work” and no project task should ever depend on the skills or efforts of a single person. In the long-term we intend to preserve the collaborative nature of the project by registering LibreELEC as a non-profit charity or foundation.
LibreELEC intends to publish a mid-term release schedule. Our goal is to never leave you (or ourselves) guessing when the next maintenance or public beta release will arrive. Kodi will occasionally provide us with a moving target to hit, but when this happens we will endeavour to communicate, not frustrate.
LibreELEC intends to be a stable and bleeding-edge distribution. Untested and often experimental commits on the bleeding-edge of development will be restricted to our master branch. The active release branch will be frozen at release and future maintenance updates will contain fixes for reported user and security issues plus minor hardware support changes only.
LibreELEC intends to be non-profit in nature with public funding goals and public updates on our progress towards those goals. If you sponsor or donate to the project we guarantee 100% of your funds will be used for project goals.
LibreELEC intends to have minimal advertising on our website and forums. Your donations and a small number of discrete and tasteful spots for commercial sponsors will ensure there’s no need to overload your browser with AdSense.
Germany
EU
justarandom added LibreELEC as alternative to Flex Launcher
Comments and Reviews
If you like Kodi, you will probably like LibreELEC.
Pros: The devs have taken it a long, long ways from its OpenELEC origins. It is now much more stable and can play 10-bit HDR video and 4k video on Pi 4 largely without issue. Not to mention it can play old video games (using ROMs), music, and photo collections. Great for a TV media center.
Unlike other reviewer with the Bluetooth remote, I use a cheap $10 USB dongle remote control on the Pi4 and it works flawlessly - it also integrates natively with my LG Magic Remote when plugged into the TV via my soundbar. (For some reason directly connecting HDMI to TV does not enable the TV remote.)
Cons: It is occasionally buggy on a Raspberry Pi 3 & 4, about once a month or so I have to force reboot it when it gets in a bad state (usually due to the rare idle freeze, or a weird lockup that occurs when trying to start a different video while another is in progress). It was more stable on a low end PC, but the Pi4 works ~95% of the time.
Development is fairly active and contributions are welcome! If you find a bug please report.
It kind of functions, but my god is it broken if you want to use a bluetooth remote with it. This has been an ongoing & often reported problem since 2017. Apparently 5 effing years isn't enough to implement SOME controller driver. Genuinely useless as far as I'm concerned. Added one star because I guess it can play a video... If you hook up a wired keyboard.