1

I just bought a Raspberry Pi 2 (model B) for my father.

After a few trials, which included:

  • installing Ubuntu Mate
  • installing Raspbian

I finally converged to plain Ubuntu (14.04), which works pretty well, and is quite fluid.

However, YouTube videos as well as videos played with VLC do not run:

  • video is not fluid
  • I see just some frame, then black screen / a fixed frame, then again just some frame
  • audio follows the same fate :(

I decided to go at least for the YouTube videos and give up with VLC video playing. I found some solutions such as this one or this one, but I did not succeed in making it work properly:

  • With the first solution, I am not able to retrieve the gIT project
  • With the second solution, I am not able to install PiVid, since it requires OMXplayer, and when I try to install OMXplayer, it is not found (neither using aptitude nor using apt-get)

Unfortunately, I need it to work, since otherwise my father cannot listen to music in streaming!

Do you have any solution to the problem?

Community
  • 1
Eleanore
  • 173
  • 2
  • 6
  • Why don't you use Raspbian? I doubt your father would care. – joan Aug 11 '15 at 16:32
  • It was not enough fluid, unfortunately, and I had some problems with the monitor. I do not know why, probably I misconfigured it. – Eleanore Aug 11 '15 at 17:11

1 Answers1

1

Omxplayer was written specifically for the pi so will not be in stock Ubuntu repositories.

The source is available here, but if you have a Raspbian image it might be easier to pull a binary out of that and try it; I can't seem to find it in the actual repo but it is installed by default. There's a shell script wrapper, /usr/bin/omxplayer, plus you need /usr/bin/omxplayer.bin.

Either way, you will also need the pi specific libraries for the videocore hardware. You could try installing those by taking rpi-update from the Raspbian image and running that; it's also in /usr/bin and is a shell script. I think the only prerequisite is curl.

You could also use the method I describe at the end here under /opt/vc.

There are other prerequisite libraries that should be in ubuntu. You will have to track those down by looking at ldd /usr/bin/omxplayer.bin on the running pi. The stuff shown as => not found needs to be installed.

If you are going to use omxplayer for youtube videos, I also recommend yt.

Community
  • 1
goldilocks
  • 56,430
  • 17
  • 109
  • 217