Hi,

We hope you are enjoying an excellent Christmas break and wish you a Happy New Year! OSMC's December update is primarily a maintenance release. We have fixed a number of bugs and have introduced some small improvements.

Kodi 16.0 (codename Jarvis) is about to enter the Release Candidate stage and is expected to achieve its stable release in around a month. OSMC has already prepared for this new version of Kodi and we have made some test builds available in our forum.

Here's what's new:

Bug fixes

  • Fix a crash which can occur when pairing some Bluetooth devices
  • Fix a memory leak caused by background WiFi scanning
  • Fix a memory leak which can occur when a DHCP lease is renewed
  • Fix a memory leak caused by DBus communication with ConnMan
  • Fix a library path so that cec-client works again
  • Fix a segmentation fault in libCEC which can occur under certain conditions
  • Fix the display of non-unicode devices in My OSMC's Bluetooth configuration utility
  • Fix an issue which could prevent recent TVHeadend installations from the App Store from starting properly
  • Fix an issue preventing some VPN clients from working properly
  • Fix an issue preventing My OSMC from correctly handling an empty advancedsettings.xml
  • Fix My OSMC issues caused by using non-unicode languages
  • Fix an issue preventing UUID based root labels from booting correctly

Improving the user experience

  • Improved Pi 1 and Pi 2 specific performance tunables to deliver better performance on both devices
  • Improved HFS+ disk support
  • Improved Bluetooth throughput by disabling background scanning when a user is not in the My OSMC -> Networking configuration menu
  • The SSH service is now configurable on first boot in the initial walkthrough to bring awareness of the daemon's presence for security
  • The Raspberry Pi now uses the new SDHost SD card driver which promises improved performance and greater SD card compatibility
  • Improved boot time for all OSMC devices
  • Improved automatic filesystem repair and recovery modes
  • Improve the kernel and bootloader upgrade process to make it more robust
  • Updated the RTMP library for better handling of streams

Miscellaneous

  • Add support for spi-bcm2835 Device Tree overlay which is used for Hyperion LED strips
  • Upgrade Raspberry Pi kernel to Linux 4.3.3
  • Added support for EXT4 filesystem encryption

Wrap up

To get the latest and greatest version of OSMC, simply head to My OSMC -> Updater and check for updates manually on your exising OSMC set up. Of course — if you have updates scheduled automatically you should receive this update shortly.

If you enjoy OSMC, please follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook and consider making a donation if you would like to support further development.

And be sure to keep your eyes peeled for the new Vero 2 -- it's going to be awesome!

Enjoy!