If you want to watch media in your living room or bedroom, there are many options nowadays. The easiest, of course, is to buy a box like Roku, Amazon Fire TV or the popular AppleTV. Some "smart" televisions even have this capability built in.

The more hands-on alternative, however, is to build a HTPC (home theater PC). The problem with that? Windows 10 no longer supports Media Center. While this is a huge pain-point for the HTPC community, the good news is that Linux is -- once again -- here to save the day. Whether you choose to build a computer, or buy a compatible device like the low-cost Raspberry Pi, the mature OpenELEC Linux distribution will give you an amazing media experience.

"The most visible change is Kodi 15.2 (Isengard). Beginning with Kodi 15.0 most audio encoder, audio decoder, PVR and visualisation addons are no longer pre-bundled into OpenELEC but can be downloaded from the Kodi addon repo if required. PVR backends such as VDR and TVHeadend will install needed dependencies automatically", says the OpenELEC Team.

The team further explains, "we now officially support WeTek's WeTek_Play device with a build that installs to internal NAND and dual-boots with Android on an SD Card. The iMX6 build extends support to all Solidrun CuBox-i/TV, Solidrun Hummingboard devices and the OSMC Vero. We recommend CuBox-i2eX / Hummingboard-i2eX or better devices".

The OpenELEC Team shares the following updated packages.

ffmpeg 2.6

mesa 10.6

Xorg-1.17

libva 1.6

systemd v219

binutils 2.25

Glibc 2.22

libressl 2.1.7

LLVM-3.6

Kernel 4.1

If you want to download the OpenELEC Linux distribution, you can get it here. If you don't wan't to build a HTPC, but still want to try it, you can buy the inexpensive WeTek Play here -- just be sure to select "MicroSD Card pre-loaded with OpenELEC" when ordering.

Photo credit: annanizami / Shutterstock