The mplayer program has a so called slave mode where a frontend controls it completely. You could try to use that directly. The manpage says:

-slave (also see -input)
Switches on slave mode, in which MPlayer works as a backend for other programs. Instead of intercepting keyboard events, MPlayer will read commands separated by a newline (\n) from stdin. NOTE: See -input cmdlist for a list of slave commands and DOCS/tech/slave.txt for their description.

In reply to Re: Creating a video player frontend in Perl - what are my options? by ambrus
in thread Creating a video player frontend in Perl - what are my options? by rocklee

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