OpenPHT is a fork of the proprietary Plex Home Theater app

May 15, 2016 08:00 GMT  ·  By

Today, LinHES maintainer Cecil Watson has announced the release of LinHES R8.4, an open source attempt to make the installation of a GNU/Linux operating system and the MythTV media center software as trivial as possible.

It has been more than a year since we last heard about the LinHES project, as the previous release, LinHES 8.3, was announced on February 20, 2015, but it looks like things are still alive and the developer managed to find some time to update the operating system's internals.

Therefore, LinHES 8.4 launches today, May 15, 2016, as an alternative to the Mythbuntu and similar products, built around the latest MythTV 0.28 open-source digital video recorder project, Kodi 16.1 media center, and OpenPHT, a fork of the well-known Plex Home Theater software.

Under the hood, LinHES 8.4 remains based on the lightweight and powerful Arch Linux operating system, which means that most of its core components have been updated to their latest versions available at the moment of the release. Also, LinHES 8.4 comes with better support for Plex media scanning.

"Simply create a Plex library with Myth in the name (i.e. Myth TV Shows, Myth Movies or Myth Sports) and the directory (/myth/recordings/TV Shows, /myth/recordings/Movies or /myth/recordings/Sports) and the Plex library will be re-scanned when /myth/recordings is updated," says Cecil Watson.

Here's how to upgrade from LinHES 8.3 to LinHES 8.4

If you're currently using the LinHES 8.3 operating system on your computer, we have good news for you, as it's possible to upgrade to today's LinHES 8.4 release using the following commands in a terminal emulator. But first, make sure that you make a backup of your files.

mythshutdown --lock
sudo sv stop mythbackend
sudo pacman -Syu
Once the upgrade process has been completed, you'll need to reboot the machine. Then, please run the mythtv-setup command or use the Alt+S keyboard shortcut and update the MythTV database for version 0.28. If you're new to LinHES, go ahead and download LinHES 8.4 right now via our website.