Perl provides access to the basic system calls needed via fork, exec, pipe, open '<&', open '>&', select, wait and waitpid.

IPC::Open3 provides a usable interface, but it's still quite low-level.

Both IPC::Run3 and IPC::Run provide a high-level interface.

so I can the control totem

I don't know how totem is controlled (or even what it is), so I answered rather generically. The above tools will allow you to spawn an asynchronous child, possibly exchanging data with it via its STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR.

Exec and backticks also wait.

exec doesn't wait. exec doesn't even start a process for which one could wait.