Bomi is a powerful multimedia player written on top of mpv, which is the spiritual successor of mplayer. What I like of Bomi is its minimal UI and its good integration on Plasma 5 (being written in Qt5). Unfortunately Bomi is not yet packaged on Debian, so you have to compile it. It’s not difficult but it’s not trivial either, because, due to the quite big list of dependencies, some trial-and-error is expected. I hope that this post may be helpful to some Debian user out there.

Configure-time dependencies

On Debian each library has a regular package and a development package (e.g. libfoo-dev) with the library headers. So I had to install the following packages, in order to have a successful ./configure:

  • libavformat-dev
  • libswscale-dev
  • libavfilter-dev
  • libass-dev
  • libdvdread-dev
  • libbluray-dev
  • libuchardet-dev
  • libglib2.0-dev
  • libxcb-icccm4-dev
  • libxcb-screensaver0-dev
  • libxcb-xtest0-dev
  • libasound2-dev

The only dependency that I couldn’t find in Debian repository is the chardet library. You may need to download and build this library by yourself, following the official instructions (you can skip the part about FFmpeg).

Compile-time dependencies:

For some reason, some Qt development modules were not checked by ./configure, so the first time I ended up with a failed compilation. To fix that I had to install also:

  • libqt5svg5-dev
  • libqt5x11extras5-dev
  • qtdeclarative5-dev

Hardware Acceleration:

In order to enable hardware acceleration support in Bomi, you have to install also:

  • libva-dev (if you have an Intel GPU)
  • libvdpau-dev (if you have a Nvidia GPU)

Optional features:

You can also install:

  • libsystemd-dev
  • libpulse-dev

to enable some systemd and pulseaudio support. I’m not yet sure what it means in practice, though.

That’s it. Once you have installed these packages, just follow the official compilation instructions. If something goes wrong, you likey have some missing dependency that you didn’t install.