it still has an openelec splash screen on boot, any idea how to get rid of that?
Well, that's very interesting, because the LibreELEC logo is part of the initramfs, which is in the kernel.img.
If you are running LE from an sd card, please enter this command under SSH:
If you do not get this result: ec3c1d0e0774093d2eabf6deb599f28f, the update failed for some reason.
(But if you are running LE from NAND, this command will not work, because there is no kernel.img under the "flash" mount point.)
and even though it says CEC connected on startup it doesn't recognise my Samsung remote?
Try to enable CEC manually in uboot:
Then restart the box...