Controlling MPlayer

Apr 8, 2010 00:00 · 394 words · 2 minute read

MPlayer 🔗

MPlayer is an extremely versatile media player, I’ve begun to use it for absolutely any media that I’m not already piping through mpd. One day while going through my XMonad config, I decided it’d be convenient to bind my media keys to control MPlayer. I already had them bound to control volume/mpd, but I figured Meta + key combinations could be the MPlayer equivalents.

A bit of googling later and I had the solution: a fifo!

Fifos 🔗

Fifos (for file in file out) are two way files on your system that can be used for communication; kind of a poor man’s socket. You can play with them like this to get the idea:

# in one terminal:
mkfifo ./fifo
tail -f ./fifo

# and in some other terminal:
echo some text > ./fifo

MPlayer setup 🔗

The MPlayer manpage states that it can read commands out of a fifo by using the input flag. Combine that with the fact that MPlayer will read any flags from ~/.mplayer/config and we’re 90% there.

mkfifo ~/.mplayer_fifo
vim ~/.mplayer/config

Add the following in that file:

input = file=/home/username/.mplayer_fifo

Now fire up a movie. Go to some other terminal and do the following:

echo pause > ~/.mplayer_fifo

If MPlayer didn’t pause, double check the above. It works for me.

Keybinds 🔗

Now it’s really up to you if you want to run these via a wrapper script, or send the commands directly from your keybind configuration. Here’s an example wrapper script if you decide to go this way:

#!/bin/bash

fifo="$HOME/.mplayer_fifo"
command="$*"

echo $command > "$fifo" &>/dev/null

Place it in your $PATH, chmod +x it, and bind some keys to script 'play', script 'pause', etc.

Personally, I put a simple function (of basically the above) in my xmonad.hs, then call that from the keybinds. Here’s the relevant section of my config:

myKeys = [ ...

         -- Mod+ to control MPlayer
         , ("M-<XF86AudioPlay>", mPlay "pause"   ) -- play/pause mplayer
         , ("M-<XF86AudioStop>", mPlay "stop"    ) -- stop mplayer
         , ("M-<XF86AudioPrev>", mPlay "seek -10") -- seek back 10 seconds
         , ("M-<XF86AudioNext>", mPlay "seek 10" ) -- seek forward 10 seconds

         , ...
         ] 

         where

           mPlay s = spawn $ "echo " ++ s ++ " > $HOME/.mplayer_fifo"

I’m using EZConfig notation in my keybindings.

I’ll leave it up to you to figure out your WM’s keybind configuration or use some generic tool like xbindkeys.

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