There have been some important changes recently to OpenELEC, which are covered well on their blog. It was only a couple of months ago when OpenELEC 2.0 was released, and that version didn’t have Raspberry Pi support. Now OpenELEC 3.0 is in beta (see beta 1 and beta 2 announcements), and the good news for Raspberry Pi users is that it’s now part of this mainstream release.

Downloads

Raspberry Pi builds can be downloaded from openelec.tv/get-openelec, and I’m now running OpenELEC 3.0 Beta 2 build 2.95.2 on my own media player.

Image files

The easiest way to get started with OpenELEC on the Raspberry Pi is to download an SD card image file and burn it onto a card. That’s how I got started, and to help out the community I’ve been creating and hosting development builds and corresponding image files for some time.

Since the entire purpose of image files is to help people get started I’m planning to stop doing image files for development builds once OpenELEC 3.0 goes stable. Until then the resources site for PiChimney.com will have image files for dev releases and image files for the official (beta) releases. My rationale here is that people getting started should probably be using a stable build, and anybody with the wherewithal to tinker with dev builds can probably handle upgrading from a stable build (or even making their own SD card or image file).

Build server blues

For some time I was able to host everything on a single server at BigV, but when their free beta came to an end I needed to find a new home (otherwise my bandwidth bill was going to be a bit on the large side). I moved things to a virtual private server at BuyVM, as they include decent amounts of bandwidth in their packages. Unfortunately I bought an OpenVZ VPS without realising that block device loopback (and essential part of the SD card image making process) is disabled for security reasons. I’ve been making up the shortfall by using a KVM based VPS for the imaging process, but this has introduced complexity and fragility to the overall process (with interlocking scripts running across remote machines).

Summary

I’ll continue to host image files for dev and beta builds until OpenELEC 3.0 goes stable, and once it does go stable I’ll host images for the stable build and continue to run the automated build server for dev releases (but there will then be no more image files for dev).