Raspbian Bullseye with OMXPlayer pre-installed

For years, OMXPlayer was the go-to media player for Raspberry Pi projects. It was fast, lightweight, and worked well even on less powerful boards like the original Pi Zero. People commonly used it to build video loopers for art exhibits, advertising displays, and digital signage. I personally used it to create my mini retro TVs and other multimedia projects.

But at some point around the transition to Raspbian Buster, OMXPlayer was removed from the official Raspberry Pi repositories. That meant it was no longer supported, and newer OS releases like Bullseye stopped including it by default. As a result, many older project tutorials you can still find online stopped working. If you’ve ever tried to revive one of those projects, chances are you hit a wall when the instructions called for OMXPlayer. The only options were to run an old Pi model on an outdated OS like Stretch, or try to manually compile and configure a custom build — which isn’t simple, since OMXPlayer depends on several libraries, fonts, and configurations to run correctly.

That’s why I put this image together. It’s a clean, minimal Raspbian Bullseye Lite image with OMXPlayer already pre-installed and working. I chose Bullseye because it still works across modern hardware including the Pi Zero, Zero 2W, 3B, and 4. The image is intentionally stripped down and left as “vanilla” as possible so you can configure it however you want, but it gives you a working base that avoids the headaches of getting OMXPlayer running yourself.

The build of OMXPlayer used comes from Michael Walsh’s updated fork on GitHub. He’s been keeping OMXPlayer updated and also added a couple of new features worth knowing about:

• Auto playlist with resume: remembers the last 10 videos you played and resumes them automatically. This can be useful, but if you’re writing your own looper script it may conflict with your setup. You can disable it by adding ‘-a’ to the OMXPlayer command line.

• Intro on-screen display: briefly shows the filename of the video when it starts playing. If you don’t want that, you can disable it by adding ‘–limited-osd’ to the OMXPlayer command line.

  For more OMXPlayer commands check out this page.

Tips for using this image:

• Write it to an SD card using Raspberry Pi Imager or a similar tool. You can set up Wi-Fi and SSH during the writing process in the app.

• On first boot, the Pi will automatically resize the filesystem and may reboot once or twice before it’s ready. Give it a little time to finish connecting to your network.

• If you’re using a Pi 4 and want to use composite video output, you’ll need to enable it through raspi-config. HDMI works by default.

• The image is 32-bit, which is perfectly fine for multimedia projects and ensures compatibility with OMXPlayer.

I created this because I had a hard time getting OMXPlayer working again for my own projects, and I know a lot of people still want to recreate projects that depend on it.  And honestly, OMXPlayer kicks ass.  VLC player can’t replace it. Hopefully, this saves you time and frustration and gives you a stable base for your own multimedia ideas.  

DOWNLOAD THE IMAGE HERE!