playerdo 2.2

Control various media players from a single command line interface.

player_do provides a simple command line interface to control whatever media player is running on your computer. It has been designed for and tested on Linux.

It is designed to allow you to configure the media buttons on your keyboard (play, pause, next etc.) to Do The Right Thing without having to change anything if you switch to a different media player.

It also includes commands install_gnome, install_mate, install_gnome3, and install_cinnamon to help set up keyboard shortcuts initially on GNOME2/Mate/GNOME3/Cinnamon. It can, however, be used with any system where you can map keyboard shortcuts to commands.

The currently supported media players can be seen by running player_do --help. Those that have been tested include the following:

• Audacious

• Amarok

• Banshee

• Clementine

• cmus

• Exaile

• Guayadeque

• moc

• MPD (configurable using MPD_HOST and MPD_PORT environment variables like mpc)

• pianobar

• Quodlibet

• Rhythmbox (needs MPRIS plugin installed and enabled)

• shell-fm (0.8 and later)

• VLC (2.0 and later)

• Firefox, Chrome (when playing some media like videos and podcasts)

Many other players will be supported due to support for the MPRIS DBUS protocol, without a specific backend. If you only need support for those players, consider using MPRIS-remote or playerctl.

To add more supported programs, see the existing code in the backends directory. Patches gratefully received!

Installation

You need Python 3.8 or later, Python 3.12 or later recommended as I test on that. We recommend the use of uv to install as below:

uv python install 3.12
uv tool install playerdo --python 3.12

This should install everything for you.

Installation using pipx

On older systems or if uv is not available, you can install using pipx to install it into its own virtualenv, using your standard system Python 3, with “system” libraries available (due to the DBUS requirementw):

pipx install playerdo --system-site-packages --python `which python3`

You will also need to install Python DBUS bindings. We recommend doing this at the system level. On Debian-like systems this is usually done with one of the following packages:

python-dbus
python3-dbus

An alternative to system-level Python DBUS is to use pipx to install them:

pipx inject playerdo dbus-python

(If an appropriate binary wheel for dbus is not found, the above may require development packages to be installed, including libglib2.0-dev and libdbus-1-dev and Python development headers).

After installation, you can use player_do test to ensure everything expected is available. It’s normal to see error messages relating to players that you do not use or have installed.

Usage

Control the currently active player using commands like:

player_do playpause
player_do next

For all commands and other options, see:

player_do --help

Links

Download: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/playerdo

Source code: https://github.com/spookylukey/playerdo

Bug tracking: https://github.com/spookylukey/playerdo/issues

Changes: https://github.com/spookylukey/playerdo/blob/master/CHANGES.rst