This release changes everything. Again

I hope someone gets that joke. Anyways, I’m the more excited about this release than any other release. RC8 had playback issues. rc9 uses OpenELEC instead of gentoo as a platform, this gives us lots of things for free:

• An image that is 100MB instead of 400MB
• lirc support
• Faster boot time
• Various bug fixes
• Less system overhead

There are still some issues, and features we want to add:

• No wifi support in OpenELEC (not totally true, but we have to set up the xbmc plugin to configure them - top priority so sit tight!)
• Can’t autoupdate (must reflash for new versions still) - yet.
• NYX support is still dodgy : (
• Overclocking is default
• In the latest build (rc9) the username/password is “openelec:openelec”. Will change it back to “plexuser:rasplex” for consistency.
• Home screen fanouts (recently added/on deck) are a bit dodgy (not instant/don’t draw). I find that navigating to and from them a few times forces them to draw. Working on a fix.

New install procedure

We now have an installer, which will automatically set up rasplex on linux and OSX. It is based on Sam Nazarko’s raspbmc installer, with some added sugar:

• Automatic selection of fastest mirror (EU or US)
• Automatically gets the latest installer (only need to get one copy of installer, it updates itself)

Find out more details at the installer’s github. Check out theinstall page to get started. Special thanks once again to Weelkin for getting the OpenELEC ball rolling (he’s also currently working on Wifi config dialog! Go him!)