Control VLC with Python

VLC is an amazing media player, or rather a media-related Swiss army knife. It has a surprising number of different control interfaces, some of which allow access over a network, such as the HTTP, Telnet and RC interfaces. It also has a Python API but just looking at the documentation is terrifying...

I experimented with controlling VLC from Python using VLC's Remote Control Interface, and wrote a small proof-of-concept code snippet. Here's how to use it:

from vlc import VLC

vlc = VLC()
vlc.add('/path/to/some/file.avi')
vlc.pause()
vlc.play()
vlc.stop()

The code is not production-grade. I will not be developing this any more, so I am putting it here for anyone to grap and hopefully do something useful with. I've only tested this on my Ubuntu machine, and it requires both VLC and screen to be installed. It also uses subprocess.run() to start VLC, which is not available in any version of Python earlier than 3.5.

Here's the library/wrapper, drop it anywhere in your Python PATH:

import socket
import subprocess


class VLC:
    def __init__(self):
        self.SCREEN_NAME = 'vlc'
        self.HOST = 'localhost'
        self.PORT = 8888

        cmd = subprocess.run(
            ['screen', '-ls', self.SCREEN_NAME,],
            stdout=subprocess.DEVNULL)
        if cmd.returncode:
            subprocess.run([
                'screen',
                '-dmS',
                self.SCREEN_NAME,
                'vlc',
                '-I',
                'rc',
                '--rc-host',
                '%s:%s' % (self.HOST, self.PORT)
            ])

        self.SOCK = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
        self.SOCK.connect((self.HOST, self.PORT))

    def x(self, cmd):
        '''Prepare a command and send it to VLC'''
        if not cmd.endswith('\n'):
            cmd = cmd + '\n'
        cmd = cmd.encode()
        self.SOCK.sendall(cmd)

    def pause(self):
        self.x('pause')

    def play(self):
        self.x('play')

    def stop(self):
        self.x('stop')

    def prev(self):
        self.x('prev')

    def next(self):
        self.x('next')

    def add(self, path):
        self.x('add %s'  % (path,))

    def enqueue(self, path):
        self.x('enqueue %s' % (path,))

    def clear(self):
        self.x('clear')

    def shutdown(self):
        self.x('shutdown')

Good luck using this for your scripts :)

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