Pause programmatically video player mpv

Question

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 w

Answer 1

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

--input-ipc-server=
       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\). 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.

See also:

• https://alexherbo2.github.io/blog/mpv/command-line-controller/
• https://gist.github.com/dwgill/a66769e0edef69c04d3b