Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center, or OpenELEC for short, is a small Linux distribution built from scratch as a platform to turn your computer into a complete XBMC media center. OpenELEC is designed to make your system boot as fast as possible and the install is so easy that anyone can turn a blank PC into a media machine in less than 15 minutes.
What is OpenELEC?
OpenELEC is an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub. The idea behind OpenELEC is to allow people to user their Home Theatre PC (HTPC) like any other device you might have attached to your TV, like a DVD player or Sky box. Instead of having to manage a full operating system, configure it and install the packages required to turn it into a hybrid media center, OpenELEC is designed to be simple to install, manage and use, making it more like running a set-top box than a full-blown computer.
With builds for ION and AppleTV, OpenELEC is ideal for smaller systems as the lightweight footprint means that your machine's resources aren't wasted on the operating system. Additionally, support for Nvidia's ION platform and Apple's Crystal HD chip means that high-definition content can be offloaded to supported graphics cards to allow low powered systems based on Intel's Atom processor to be effectively used as a media center base.
I've heard of XBMC-Live and XBMC-freak. What makes OpenELEC different?XBMC-Live is distributed by the XBMC-Team. It's based on Ubuntu, which means that it comes with all the Ubuntu software. In essence, you're running a full Ubuntu install, but without a display manager. Since Ubuntu strives to support many hardware platforms, it has to include drivers and firmware for many systems, making it slow to boot. Also, Ubuntu comes with many services which are required on a full desktop/server, but aren't required for a media center. These also slow down the boot process and take up valuable resources on the machine.
XBMCfreak is based on XBMC-Live, but features some patches and enhancements not found in XBMC-Live as they're either waiting to be included or not yet ready for full release. It may also be based on a newer version of Ubuntu than XBMC-Live. While that makes it more up-to-date than XBMC-Live, it also makes it slightly less stable.
Unlike XBMC-Live and XBMCfreak, OpenELEC isn't based on Ubuntu - in fact, it's not based on any distribution. Instead, OpenELEC has been built from scratch specifically to act as a media center. This means it can be streamlined to certain hardware and only needs to include the packages absolutely required, making OpenELEC as streamlined as possible. In addition, OpenELEC is designed to be managed as an appliance - it can automatically update itself, is managed almost entirely from within XBMC and boots in seconds. You never need to see a management console or have Linux knowledge to use it.
