If you’ve been looking for info on how to build a home theater PC, you may have heard of the LibreELEC operating system for Kodi. LibreELEC is a minimal yet fully-functional operating system created for the sole purpose of running Kodi. Based on Linux and originally intended specifically for the Raspberry Pi, it has since been ported to other single-board computers and x86_64 PCs.
Now, a stable version of LibreELEC 10.0 becomes available for download. As usual, the developers have summarized further information in the Release Notes for LibreELEC 10.0 “Matrix”.
LibreELEC 10 now offers stable and good working versions for Allwinner, Generic and Rockchip devices. The official announcement focuses on what works and what doesn’t on Raspberry Pi 4.
Basically, LibreELEC 10 on Raspberry Pi 4 is 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. However the Raspberry Pi 4 users should keep in mind that there are several remaining issues, notably with 4Kp50/p60 video output, and the Hyperion Control addon.
Support for the Raspberry Pi Zero and the original versions of the Raspberry Pi have been discontinued. The drivers for Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 are currently not yet feature complete and stable, so there are no LibreELEC 10.0 releases for them.
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.
Due the many breaking changes at Kodi and LibreELEC, it is strongly recommended to create a backup BEFORE you upgrade. Otherwise, rolling back is basically impossible. So unless you are already running an image with Kodi 19 inside, a clean install is preferred.
You can check out the project’s download section to get LibreELEC 10.0 for your hardware. You should choose the LibreELEC USB-SD Creator for your current platform, and it will help you to create a bootable storage device for your media player.
