How to install omxplayer on minimal distros?

Question

Currently I'm using omxplayer on Raspbian to automatically play a folder of videos in loop after boot. It works great. The only problem is that it takes almost 90 seconds to boot and start to play video files. I switched to Xbian ; it was better. But still it would take almost 50 seconds to boot and play video files.

So I decided to find very minimal distros with fast boot process. I searched a lot, and found Minibian (http://sourceforge.net/projects/minibian/) and Moebius (http://moebiuslinux.sourceforge.net/), which both are probably the minimized versions of Raspbian. These distros claim to have very fast boot processes (20 and 10 seconds), which make them ideal for minimal embedded applications. This is great.

However, it seems that people have had problems installing omxplayer on these distros. Would you please help what we shall change, or what dependencies we shall install first, so as to be able to install omxplayer on very minimal distros, like Minibian or Moebius !?

By the way, do you suggest any other light and minimal distro to use?

Thank you for your time and support.

Answer 1

You can fetch omxplayer build from this link http://omxplayer.sconde.net especially on debian based minimal distro and install it. On other flavors, you can get source from http://github.com/huceke/omxplayer and compile it by yourself.

======================================================================== Update:

I burned the latest minibian image to a spare SD card and ran it on my Rpi 2. Boot time is about 8 - 10 secs. And since It is a debian OS, you can simply type "apt-get update && apt-get install omxplayer" to install it. Although before doing that, you would like to install raspi-config (apt-get install raspi-config) to expand your rootfs size as there is hardly any room for videos. :)

And Yes, you can use http://subogero.github.io/remotepi/ on minibian. I just installed it. Seems to be working fine.

Hope you find this helpful.