Thinking about switching to LibreELEC instead of customing my own Ubuntu KODI but have a few questions.

1st Official Post

    Hi.

    I am building a new HTPC and looking at Linux based distros to run Kodi from.

    Here are my questions:

    1.) Does LibreELEC use PulseAudio? I typically have to remove this to get audio passthrough working in Ubuntu. e.g. send everything to my receiver to process

    2.) Does it have the ability to properly turn off external USB 3 drive enclosures full of HDs? I typically have to create a custom script for this - mount the drives on boot and then this solves it on shutdown.

    3.) Do I have an alternate GUI to work from if not running Kodi? e.g. to work on video files, update Video drivers, etc...

    4.) Is there any improvement to Wake On LAN provided over Ubuntu? I normally have to configure NIC settings from command line to get it to work.

    Thanks for any guidance. Still waiting on parts for my new system but am excited to start installing once it arrives.

    Spent the last year building a home theater that has 9.2.4 (9 surrounds, 2 subs, and four ceiling speakers).
    For now I am using a 65" OLED but will be upgrading once they start coming out with HDMI 2.1 projectors.

    Primary sources I use:
    Netflix addon
    Prime addon

    Have my own collection of BlueRay/4k Blueray discs that I extract to MKV format and keep the originals in a box to use.

    Have my own collection of Music as well.

    • Official Post

    1. LE builds with Alsa and Pulse; the latter is only used for BT audio (streaming to LE from a phone or other BT device) and Alsa is used for Kodi. As pulse is included in the image you can always go fiddle with it to enable pulse output in Kodi .. but sounds like this is not desirable.

    2. It would depend on the capabilities of the enclosures/firmware being used in them. Most drives will power down when not used. Some drives have shitty firmware that needs manual forcing so there's no single answer. If you need to force it with a script in other distros it may need to be forced in LE as well.

    3. No. LE is built to run Kodi only, there is no "Desktop" environment. You also cannot tinker with drivers from within LE itself (there are no build tools) but you can create your own custom LE image with changes using our very simple to learn build-system (on GitHub).

    4. We run a newer <everything> code stack than other distros which sometimes brings improvements (due to newer code) but otherwise no idea.

    Thanks much chewitt for your answers.
    I will see what works for me out of the box then will give the custom LE image a go using the simple to learn build-system you mentioned.

    Only other questions I have:
    5. Is there a list of packages installed in linux with versions for each release of LE?

    6. You mentioned no "Desktop" environment. What is the choice of bootloader | splashscreen? (e.g. Grub 2 | Plymouth)

    • Official Post

    5. We don't embed a listing of packages in each image but GitHub - LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv: Just enough OS for KODI has tagged sources for all our releases.

    6. We use syslinux (extlinux) by default and plymouth light. We provide no choice in our images but it's Linux so there is nothing to stop you from using Grub if you wanted to configure it yourself. You're stuck with plymouth light though as this is embedded into the image files. There are probably posts in here for doing it but there is no formal project documentation.