I want to be able to watch movies and play music from other people's laptops. So I need a live distribution that can play any sort of multimedia files. That means mp3s, H.265 too. Hardware support would be nice. And a power manager just in case.

So far I could find all sort of projects with the last release date somewhere before 2013. I do not want to install anything. I want it not to touch the host system. And networking, I don't care, I'd rather have it disabled.

Thanks!

Welcome to the forum! Are you really in Antarctica? That may be a first here.

Many distros can be run in that way nowadays, but I'd go for one that's intended to be: Puppy, Knoppix, or Slax. Knoppix has everything but the kitchen sink, while Slax doesn't have a lot of software, but Puppy seems just right to me. It usually runs by copying itself into a ram-disk, which it can just about do in 512 MB. That way you can use any computer without leaving any trace behind when you've finished. Configuration choices are saved in a file, which can be put on the usb stick, and you can install new software there too. It's very tolerant of hardware: even my old relics can run it.

http://puppylinux.com/

> Many distros can be run in that way nowadays

That's new. Some time ago most distributions were not even touching DVD support, even less BlueRay. MP3 was an issue, but now that the patents are gone I guess everything is okay. Which does not mean h.263, h.264 and h.265 are installed as well.

Sorry. That is an antique distribution. At least 2 years old, most probably it does not do hardware acceleration on newer hardware. And it ships with an equally antique and buggy vlc. No h.265. Can't play audio tracks labeled as (und) meaning the language tag was not set. And that is a ride less than 5 minutes.

In case someone drops by looking for the same answer, one working choice is Sabayon Linux. An awful choice of software. It is big. But on the test machine it does hardware acceleration. And the weird player could do everything I threw at. Haven't tested BT support. Else, it works out of the box with a recent kernel.

Likely AntiX will work for you, as it can be run with persistence, should anything you need be missing initially.
http://antix.mepis.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

@fatmac: I'll give it a try. Debian Jessie isn't exactly new. But why not?

4MLinux is what you are looking for.

.

1 members found this post helpful.

h265 won't work satisfactorily if your hardware (the gpu) doesn't support it!
if it does, you need a fairly new kernel and graphic driver, so e.g. debian stable wouldn't be such a good choice.
distros that use fairly new kernel & software: all Arch-based, ubuntu, mint, ...
apart from that this is more a question of which media player you use. i love mpv, it does everything! you don't need a specialised distro.

- You could share your movies using samba (smb common). "smbpassd -a" will create a new samba user.
- You can find many codes on SDL to show the cover of your movies on a given machine. You press Enter and mplayer fires up.


It is an idea. It is easy to install and works also on Windows machines.
It could be made and setup in less than one hour.

Any distro with Kodi media center will serve your purpose. Kodi can play just about anything, has hardware support for most GPUs, does not require any additional codecs installed, and plays x265 better than anything that I tried.
If you only need it to play media, you can try LibreELEC or OpenELEC, they are specialized distros for Kodi, very light and fast

I agree; you can build anything you want with antiX. It is based on Debian repositories, and you can obtain it in multiple varieties, depending on whether you want to closely administer everything (in that case, get antiX Core and configure everything on the system), or get just a "little" head start with antiX Base, and install the applications and desktop environment you prefer.

But if you want a system that's relatively light, but still functionally complete, either antiX Full or a desktop-based MX-16 (XFCE desktop) can also be run from CD, DVD, or USB and carried with you, or fully installed on your system, your choice.