Kodi academy
New versions of Kodi and LibreELEC are out, but only for Raspberry Pi 4 users (for now)…
LibreELEC was forked from OpenELEC, which began life in 2009 as a minimal Linux flavour for running XBMC. This also found its way to the Pi very soon after the latter’s inception.
In 2017, though, the project was abandoned and most of the developers joined the LibreELEC project. LibreELEC describes itself as Just Enough OS (JEOS) to run Kodi and strategically times its releases to coincide with those of the latter. Kodi 19, codenamed Matrix, was a big release and in late August 2021 this was incorporated into LibreELEC 10.0.0. Since then there have been a few point revisions of both. When we wrote this feature, we used LibreELEC 10.0.1 with Kodi 19.3.
By the time you read it, it’s likely that newer editions will be available.
Breaking changes
We were a little shocked that older Pis, anything other that the Pi 4 in fact, were not currently supported on LibreELEC 10, and indeed that the Pi Zero and original Pi won’t be supported in any future release. It’s perhaps the kind of thing you should check early in the planning stages. Fortunately, and big thanks to the Pi Foundation, we had in our possession an 8GB Pi 4 which we can confirm works beautifully with LibreELEC 10. (I’d like that Pi back now, please – Eben). By the time you read this LibreELEC 10 will be closer to supported on the Pi 2 and 3. For now, you can happily run LibreELEC 9 on earlier Pis – the interface and functionality is much the same. In fact, the last and most colourful part of this feature currently only works there. See the box (right) for more on LibreELEC 9.2 and Kodi Leia.
There are a few reasons for this high hardware bar, the most pressing of them being that Pi graphics drivers (and those of many other small ARM devices) in LibreELEC are undergoing a major rewrite. Previously, each build would incorporate the required vendor kernel, other proprietary weaponry and some ugly patches to get accelerated graphics working with Kodi. This was an ad hoc process and since Kodi 19 no longer supports most of these proprietary methods, they’ve been removed in LibreELEC 10. Instead, the goal is for all platforms to use uniform display and decoding methods by way of the GBM (Generic Buffer Management) and V4L2 (Video for Linux 2) APIs. This will enable all builds to run on a mainline kernel without any ugly hacks.
Besides those changes, the plugin system has been upgraded to Python 3.
This means that any addons still based on Python 2 won’t work. All of the official Kodi addons have been updated, but third-party ones (including many nefarious ones used to access pirate content) have not. Python 2 add-ons are automatically disabled by the upgrade, so if you rely on any of these it’s worth holding fire on LibreELEC 10 until such time as they are updated.