Hi everyone,

I know some of you were expecting a final release, however it’s important we get things right. As such, we’ve decided to label this build a Release Candidate but we are expecting that this build will provide an upgrade path to the final version of OSMC. With this build we’ll be evaluating our update system, network infrastructure and build system to ensure it’s in good shape for the stable release.

Here’s what we’ve been working on:

Raspberry Pi 2

We’ve now fully optimised our Raspberry Pi 2 build by basing it on upstream Debian Jessie and building Kodi with full NEON optimisation. I can’t think of a better day to show off our new Pi 2 build than Pi day itself!

Bug fixes

Fix missing Blu-ray menu support

Fix a race condition preventing the OSMC Settings add-on from opening

Fix a bug where some dialogs in OSMC Settings did not display properly

Fix a bug where the Kodi web server would not run on privileged ports (< 1024)

Fix a bug where splash screen did not display on Raspberry Pi 2

Fix a bug where SSA (Substation Alpha) subtitles did not display

Fix a bug where the MOTD was displayed twice when logging in via SSH

Fix an issue where some packages depending on an alternative ping package would not be installable

Fix an issue where NFS root installations always used DHCP even when a static IP configuration was specified

Fix an issue with mounting exFAT filesystems

Fix an issue which prevented the ‘xbmc-send’ client from working

Fix an issue which causes crashes with the MythTV PVR client on Raspberry Pi 2

Fix an issue that caused time racing between network time servers which in turn could cause CEC dropouts

Make sure the correct TVHeadend version is displayed in the About page of the web interface

Fix some issues with Intel ConnMan (connection manager)

Improving the user experience

Add support for wireless and wired network configuration within OSMC

Preliminary support for Bluetooth pairing within My OSMC. We’ll be adding the ability to pair more devices soon

Improve stability of wireless network connections

Improved the OSMC skin significantly, giving it a fresh look and ironing out many bugs that were present in our initial release

Add a walkthrough on first run to help you configure your OSMC device

Improve the installer graphics

Add a better splash screen

Use SIMD for accelerated JPEG processing on compatible platforms

Most remotes should now work out of box without any additional configuration. If you’d like to configure a GPIO remote, check out our Wiki for instructions

Improve clock frequency settings for Raspberry Pi 2

Preserve environment path when sudo commands are run

Offer an interactive countdown for USB installations and give clearer messages during install

Added disk images on the download page so you no longer have to use the installer

Improve CIFS / Samba share mounting reliability: allow lower security connections by default when mounting CIFS shares

Improve Kodi add-on performance by compiling addons to byte-code where possible

Changing the timezone in Kodi will now change the system time as well

Improve buffer handling with advancedsettings.xml tuning

Added default directories in the OSMC home directory for media

Miscellaneous

Add install utility support for OpenSUSE 13.2

Use BusyBox implementations of utilities to prevent package conflicts and reduce filesystem footprint

Improve error handling in the target installer

Improve DNS option handling for NFS installations with static IP configuration

Improve build times by removing non-essential packages in toolchain dependency resolver

Add Raspberry Pi NOOBS images (pending approval from Raspberry Pi)

Improve support for legacy NFS servers

Restore time from last shut down on systems that do not have a real time clock

App Store

You’ve probably heard us talking about this for a while and it’s now here in an early form. You can now see how things work and install a variety of applications. We’ve chosen the App Store as a way to ship most of our new features for a few key reasons:

We can keep updating them, independent of releases

We can keep OSMC small and fast: you choose what you want to install, and you get no bloat shipped by default that you struggle to find out how to remove later!

We want more developers to contribute to OSMC

Simply head into My OSMC to get started. We’ve got a lot more apps planned and we’re also in the process of securing other developers to join the OSMC platform so don’t feel disheartened if what you’re looking for isn’t there yet.

Infrastructure

OSMC has experienced extremely high traffic (thanks to great sites like LifeHacker and Wall Street Journal) in the past month and as such we have bolstered our infrastructure to ensure a reliable update system and make sure we can keep the OSMC website and forums online for everybody. Interest in OSMC has already been overwhelmingly positive: it’s not even out in its final form yet and we’ve seen an amazing amount of users.

Wrap up

This release candidate build is available in the Windows, OS X and Linux installers now so feel free to get testing! A fresh install is necessary to get the new build. We’d appreciate it if you could spread the news about our release by sharing OSMC’s announcement via Thunderclap here.

We hope you enjoy it

Best wishes from Team OSMC