LibreELEC transformed my Raspberry Pi into the ultimate Roku replacement
LibreELEC is a Linux-based operating system that’s designed purely with media consumption in mind. Pair it with an old (or new) Raspberry Pi and hide it behind the TV for an invisible and highly capable media center setup.
If you’ve been looking for the perfect Raspberry Pi media center, you might have just found it.
LibreELEC is a media-focused operating system
LibreELEC is a whole operating system designed with media consumption in mind. The first thing you’ll see on the splash screen when you boot into LibreELEC is the strap line “Just enough OS for Kodi,” which should tell you everything you need to know.
Kodi, previously known as XBMC (and the Xbox Media Center before that), is the best open-source media center project that money can’t buy. It’s a juggernaut in the space, having evolved over decades of development into a play-anything, stream-anything platform for the living room.
The LibreELEC operating system puts Kodi at the heart of the experience, which means booting directly into Kodi on startup. There’s no traditional desktop to be found here, just a media center front-end that starts up in record time. Unlike booting to a desktop like Raspberry Pi OS or Ubuntu, LibreELEC drops you in front of the Kodi interface in around 30 seconds from cold (when booting from a microSD card).
This makes it a lightweight operating system, with the total size of the LibreELEC operating system included in a 160MB download. Once installed, I had around 15GB of free space on my 16GB card. If you’re really keen on polishing the LibreELEC experience up, installing the operating system on an SSD using the M.2 HAT+ would yield some big performance gains.
The power of Kodi
The first time you boot LibreELEC, the operating system will take around 20 seconds to configure itself before rebooting. The next thing you’ll see after the splash screen is the Kodi interface, with a welcome message aimed specifically at LibreELEC users. You can think of the platform as a custom version of Kodi, with a few enhancements to make it easier to get going.
One of those enhancements is the addition of a setup wizard, which guides you through the process of setting a hostname (which is how your media center will be seen by other devices on your local network), enabling SSH if you want it, and connecting to Wi-Fi. Samba network shares are automatically enabled until you opt out, which gives you easy access to your LibreELEC files from any other computer.
From here, it’s a case of setting up Kodi as you would on any other device. Kodi uses libraries to separate content like movies, TV shows, and music. You can specify what a folder contains using the file browser, and Kodi will update your library with artwork and episode information. You can also skip this step and just play files directly if you want.
It’s worth noting that you get all of the same capabilities you would get running Kodi on another platform. You can enable the UPnP server so that Kodi serves up any media you have added to other devices over the network, enable AirPlay support so that you can stream wirelessly from Apple devices, and use third-party add-ons to greatly expand what Kodi can do.
You can even set up tuners for watching and recording live TV, if that’s your thing.
Getting started with LibreELEC on the Raspberry Pi
It couldn’t be easier to get started with LibreELEC, since the project is included as a download within the media operating systems section of the official Raspberry Pi Imager. Just open the imager, select your model, select LibreELEC, and then nominate an SD card to sacrifice. The whole process is over in a matter of minutes on account of the platform being so small.
You can do this from within Raspberry Pi OS or by downloading the imager from the Raspberry Pi website. Failing this, you can download the official LibreELEC imager or the relevant image for your operating system from the project’s downloads page (and then burn it using a tool like Etcher).
You’ll need a keyboard and mouse to complete the first setup comfortably, though you can skip this and head to Kodi’s settings, then use the LibreELEC settings panel to add a Bluetooth controller. Pair anything that’s compatible with Kodi on other platforms, with gamepads and “air mice” being particularly popular means of control.
Arguably, the biggest hurdle to overcome is storage. You can use your Raspberry Pi’s USB ports to connect external storage (make sure it’s USB 3.0), but you can also point Kodi at network shares using the “Add Source” option in the file browser and specifying local NFS or SMB locations. You can also add remote connections over FTP, WebDAV, and others.
But this is just the beginning. Head to the “Add-ons” section and browse the Kodi and LibreELEC repositories. Many of the best add-ons will be found in private repositories, which you can add as and when you come across them. I recently added a private repository that added support for a local (Australian) free-to-air TV stream, so I could watch Ashes cricket on the Raspberry Pi next to me while I worked.
The takeaway here is that if you want to access a particular service or broadcaster, you can probably do with some searching and a few minutes of tweaking.
LibreELEC currently supports the Raspberry Pi 2 and above, but its capabilities are limited by your hardware. While 4K HDR movies encoded in H.265 work great on my Raspberry Pi 5-based board, you will probably run into issues with these on older boards.
If you’re looking for something with a little more grunt, you might want to consider a mini PC instead.
