OpenELEC on the Orange Pi

Install Kodi on the Orange Pi

OpenELEC is an operating system built around Kodi, allowing you to turn your device in a media center. Installing OpenELEC on the Orange Pi is quite simple. In this post I will show you how to download, burn and load OpenELEC on the Orange Pi Plus 2e. The OpenELEC image is also available for the Orange Pi One, Orange Pi PC and Orange Pi Lite.

As in the Armbian example you will need:

• an Orange Pi Plus 2e
• 5V 2A charger
• HDMI cable
• microSD card, 4GB or higher
• USB microSD card adapter (if your computer doesn’t have one)
• keyboard (and mouse)
• a software that is able to create a bootable SD card, like Rufus
• jernej’s OpenELEC image for the Orange Pi Plus 2e

So first head here to download the corresponding image for your device and then unzip the archive. Next write the .img file to a microSD card using Rufus. After a few minutes the card will be ready.

Insert the SD card in your Orange Pi and turn on the device. You will see the OpenELEC logo for a few minutes, after which the installation wizard will start. Type in the desired hostname, select a network and choose to enable SSH if you wish. That’s it, you can now play music or movies from an USB stick or an external hard-disk connected to your Orange Pi.

You can browse the media files on the external devices connected to the Orange Pi in Videos> Files.

Installing YouTube on Orange Pi

In addition to watching media from any of your storage devices, you can install video add-ons that enable you to access online content. Let’s install for example the YouTube add-on from the official Kodi repository. To do that you have to go to System> Settings> Add-ons> Install from repository> Kodi add-on repository> Video Add-ons>YouTube. On the new dialog window press install. You can see the add-on in Videos> Video add-ons.

Similarly you can install any of the hundreds of Kodi video, music and scripting add-ons.