Really impressed with OpenELEC

mcveigh

Diamond Member
Dec 20, 2000
6,468
6
81
My HTPC hardware is about ten years old. (An ATI 780G based motherboard with ddr2 ram, it will decode about any 1080P content so it's ok)
I used to run SageTV and DVR everything with my Nvidia DualTV capture card and a HDHomerun.
More recently it has been running Win7 with Kodi to watch ripped movies.
AfterI got netflix I setup my logitech remote to switch to WMC with a button press...just for netflix.

The past couple of years i've been having issues. the hard drives would sometimes disappear from the bios. bootldr messages, things like that. A few months ago we got a fireTV stick and have been using that for everything. With kids we mostly watch netflix/ amazon prime.

Sometimes I would get asked about the movies I had ripped on the HTPC, it annoyed me it wouldn't reliably work. I can't afford to get new hardware at this time though.

I put OpenELEC on an old 4GB thumb drive and told the HTPC to boot from that...AMAZING. It plays ALL my movies. It has samba setup properly so I can see my drives on the network. Yes I don't think my blu-ray drive will work but it's been years since I used that anyways.
It's really nice when something....just works.

I just thought I'd share my thoughts. If you are thinking of trying it. grab 2 thumb drives and put the installer on and and then reboot and install it on the second thumb drive.
 

LoveMachine

Senior member
May 8, 2012
491
3
81
Can it do Netflix or Amazon streaming? does it support Silverlight?

Nope, and the developers are pretty solid on indicating that isn't in it's future anytime soon. KodiBuntu, though, does. It's a bit larger of a build; a more full-fledged Linux branch that still works seamlessly with Kodi, but DOES allow you to install Chrome and a few add-ons with Kodi that let you launch Netflix/amazon from within Kodi.
 

poofyhairguy

Lifer
Nov 20, 2005
14,612
318
126
Yup, Openelec is my go-to on a client Kodi box nowadays. For my main ones I still use Kodbuntu.

It really does a good job as the Kodi OS. I like the wireless GUI they added to Openelec.
 

MaxDepth

Diamond Member
Jun 12, 2001
8,758
43
91
Yeah, with better hardware in smaller packages, it's hard to justify maintaining a large HTPC box, especially with all the streaming opportunities XBMC, er, KODI provides. For instance, my Samsung DVD player has their own interface and plugins to Netflix and Amazon.

I'm switching my old HTPC box from home theatre to becoming a FreeNAS box.

Actually this whole thing was precipitated by the HTPC's RAID collapsing and struggling to rebuild. The funny thing is that I might put the old Win7 drive back into the system to get the Windows 10 upgrade and then pull it back out. (I hate to waste a license.)
 

Dave3000

Golden Member
Jan 10, 2011
1,343
91
91
Yeah, with better hardware in smaller packages, it's hard to justify maintaining a large HTPC box, especially with all the streaming opportunities XBMC, er, KODI provides. For instance, my Samsung DVD player has their own interface and plugins to Netflix and Amazon.

I'm switching my old HTPC box from home theatre to becoming a FreeNAS box.

Actually this whole thing was precipitated by the HTPC's RAID collapsing and struggling to rebuild. The funny thing is that I might put the old Win7 drive back into the system to get the Windows 10 upgrade and then pull it back out. (I hate to waste a license.)

One good thing about using a mid-tower sized desktop as a HTPC is that you can have more than 2 hard drives installed. If you had a small system using as a HTPC you would most likely need a NAS if you want more than one hard drive installed or a bunch of external hard drives and external hard drives and NASs do take up extra space so I don't think you save space going for a mini HTPC over a normal sized desktop PC if you have a NAS next to it or the external hard drives next to it.