Reputation: 1109

Pause programmatically video player mpv

I would like to know if there is a way to send a message to a running process on linux ?

For example, is it possible to programmatically "pause" a video launched with mpv.

Upvotes: 17

Answers (3)

hermancain

Reputation: 1622

To control mpv remotely (eg from another terminal session) you can also start it with the option

--input-ipc-server=/tmp/mpvsocket

and control it by issuing commands like this:

echo '{ "command": ["set_property", "pause", true] }' | socat - /tmp/mpvsocket

See man mpv for (many) more details.

edit: see also mpv --list-properties

edit2: The most simple way I've found to "toggle" pause/play is

{"command": ["cycle", "pause"]}

Upvotes: 29

aude

Reputation: 1872

It's possible to control mpv through IPC. From the manual mpv(1):

--input-ipc-server=<filename>
       Enable the IPC support and create the listening socket at the given path.

       On  Linux and Unix, the given path is a regular filesystem path.
       On Windows, named pipes are used, so the path refers to the pipe namespace (\\.\pipe\<name>). If the \\.\pipe\ prefix is missing, mpv will add it automatically before creating the pipe, so --input-ipc-server=/tmp/mpv-socket and --input-ipc-server=\\.\pipe\tmp\mpv-socket are equivalent for IPC on Windows.

       See JSON IPC for details.

A couple of examples:

$ echo 'cycle pause'   | socat - /tmp/mpv-socket
$ echo 'playlist-prev' | socat - /tmp/mpv-socket
$ echo 'playlist-next' | socat - /tmp/mpv-socket

See mpv(1) to learn more.

Pause programmatically video player mpv

Answers (3)

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