Distribution recommended for minimal OS installation

Folks,

I am working on a set-top media box. When booted, the box will simply bring up a media player. No other applications would run.

At present, we use VLC for the media player.

I am a bit biased towards debian-based distributions as the repositories tend to have everything I need. Plus, I am used to "apt-get" style install.

After a little bit of research, I settled on the following:

Minimal Ubuntu + OpenBox.

OpenBox is lightweight window manager and seems it can play VLC.

I am wondering if there is a better alternative. Although disk space is not that important, performance is.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Regards,
Peter

if, as you say, performance is important, you may want to consider a source-based distro, like Gentoo. They take a little more elbow grease to install, but are worth it b/c they are built specifically for your hardware, with only the features you want. Along those lines, maybe Gentoox, a Gentoo-based XBMC port, would be of interest to you.

Instead of OpenBox, you could go truly minimal...
TWM.

I have my media server running Arch. it's minimal and you can put any desktop environment you wan't on it.

A very minimal Debian install with IceWM, TWM or one of the boxes. Better yet, if running just sound files, have no "GUI" at all and run all from a command line music player like mp3blaster, mplayer or cmus. With video you would of course need xwindows.

Echoes: 13 Command Line Tools for Audio on Linux