Software Update: CoreELEC 19.0 Matrix

The developers behind Core Embedded Linux Entertainment Center recently released version 19.0 Matrix. CoreELEC is a fork of LibreELEC, which in turn arose after a large number of developers left OpenELEC due to disagreements and started their own business. These Linux distributions are based on Kodi and can turn a computer into a full-fledged htpc. CoreELEC focuses specifically on the chips of amlogic. The release notes for this release are as follows:

CoreELEC 19.0 Matrix

CoreELEC 19.0 Matrix is ​​now available. We have come a long way to the first stable Kodi Matrix release, and there have been big changes in CoreELEC. It is based upon Kodi v19.0 final.

CoreELEC 19 becomes the active development branch and it is based on CoreELEC 9.2.6 Amlogic-NG. So all devices that support Amlogic-NG 9.2.6 will also support CoreELEC 19.0-Matrix. There is currently no support for GXBB and GXM (S905 and S912 respectively) based devices as these SoC are EOL and there are multiple devices with newer SoC available.

CoreELEC decided to remove support of these SoC family because they aren’t supported anymore by Amlogic in newer kernel than 3.14. We spent many hours trying to port these SoC families to the new kernel but it wasn’t successful. Also, the fact of maintaining two different kernels with different Kodi branches is just too time consuming. Please remember that all CoreELEC team members do their work in their own free time and free for you! If you are able to help in porting these SoC family to the newer kernel please feel free to open a pull request or provide a patch.