That's one heck of a question and specifications list. I will offer you a simple suggestion to look at, it's mplayer's slave mode, which runs well from Tk ( with IPC::Open3), see Perl/Tk front-end to mplayer. If you are clever, you can separate the view window from the control window, and figure out the slave mode commands to do what you need.

Another example for ripping videos is at z-charcoal-video-converter

Any particular reasons why this is or is not a suitable task for Perl?

It may be too slow for some heavy duty video tasks.

I would concentrate on GStreamer if I were you, it has a perl module, but you may have better luck running it thru IPC, so it's forked off.