Fabio Manganiello<p>Anyone knows of something like <a class="hashtag" href="https://manganiello.social/tag/ffplay" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ffplay</a>, but with support for external commands to control playback?</p><p>Maintaining four different local media integrations in <a class="hashtag" href="https://manganiello.social/tag/platypush" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Platypush</a> (vlc, mpv, mplayer and omxplayer) is tiring, and each of those players comes with its own overhead, caveats and API quirks.</p><p>I’d be much easier if I could just pipe any stream to <code>ffplay -</code> and call it a day, and have a way to easily pass play/pause/stop/volume etc. commands to ffplay - over stdin, over socket, over signals, anything works.</p><p>Platypush could then be “its own” media player solely based on ffmpeg. Anything would be piped to ffplay over stdin.</p><p>Unfortunately, I can’t find a single way to programmatically control ffplay during playback that works - outside of hacks with keystroke emulation that are unlikely to work in Wayland anyway.</p><p>And so far I’ve been very tempted from meddling with GStreamer unless really required - first because it’d be a Linux-only solution, and second because it depends on the dbus+GLib and carries a whole lot of dependencies with it, while ffplay needs basically only the ffmpeg package.</p><p>Anyone who knows how to get this to work, or even a simple stand-alone command line player or media framework that can be externally controlled and uses as a base, feel free to share!</p>