OpenPLi officially does not have experimental branch, even though you could say that their GitHub repository is experimental as it is daily updated and also images are created daily. But in reality OpenPLi repository is not experimental as its staff does not include all the latest improvements that are being made available by users of this image. Official experimental branch will be available soon.

One of such improvements that everyone is waiting for is gstreamer. OpenPLi still uses very old version of gstreamer – v0.10. It “works” but it is obsolete piece of code that already reached version 1.8. Latest development offers lots of improvements especially with streaming.

There are two experimental images based on OpenPLi that you can try:

1. SatDreamGr images – support for Dreambox, ET, Vu+, Ixuss and XP receivers
2. Builds from MastaG – http://forums.openpli.org/topic/40872-unofficial-pli-4-gstreamer-1x-images-2016-03/

There are some other improvements included, for example here is changelog from latest MastaG images:
– Replaced the official bootlogo with the World Press Photo of 2015:
“Hope for a New Life” by Warren Richardson.
– Resynced with master and taapat’s oe-core.
– Gstreamer snapshot upgraded to 1.7.90, except for spark/spark7162 where I ship version 1.6.3.
Reason for this was the playbin issue which I couldn’t solve: http://forums.openpl…ndpost&p=534693
– FFMpeg upgraded to 3.0 (thx to Taapat for the recipes).
gstreamer1.0-libav is now compiled against a reduced version of ffmpeg, leaving more free space.
– Reworked the Dreambox BSP thx to Captain and gjstroom for their work in OE-A.
Hopefully the DM800Se V2, DM7020HD V2 and DM500HD V2 are now working again.
If you have such receiver, please test and report back.
– Added libluray and the blurayplayer plugin by Taapat.
– Moved EMC plugin back to the feeds.
– Added Media-button support in keymap.xml thx to .:MarcinO:.
– Added wifi support for Atemio Nemesis thx to .:MarcinO:.
– Applied patch to servicemp3.cpp from mx3L to fix possible GSOD on switching audio tracks.
– Applied patch to servicemp3.cpp from mx3L for faster IPTV zapping.
– Applied patch to the dvbmediasink from mx3L to fix a possible freeze when seeking mp4 files.
See: http://forums.openpl…ndpost&p=534766
Please test and report back for me.
– Applied the linux 2.6.18 vermagic removal patch.
You should be able to load any kernel module on the DM800 again (use at your own risk).
– Created images for X Solo Mini 3 and Zgemma Star i55.
– Created new libeplayer builds for spark/spark7162 based on ffmpeg 3.0 thx to Taapat.
– Hopefully fixed CrossEPG (untested).
– Applied christophecvr’s patch for setting the debug level.
See: http://forums.openpl…ndpost&p=530210
You can find the option in the bottom at Menu -> Settings -> User-interface.
Setting it to “0” will disable eDebug’s completely and will give you smoother playback of IPTV streams on slower receivers.

You can see that there are many improvements, not only gstreamer. The most interesting one is the debug level patch. If you set debug level to 0, you finally get normal receiver behavior when playing video files with external subtitles. With normal OpenPLi you get annoying spinners when fast forwarding video with external subtitles.

Hope you will find this article useful.