Telnet: Find out if playing or paused

[mostafa]

Hi. I'm trying to write a script that toggles playback in VLC; if something is playing it should be paused and, if not, playing should start/resume. I'm going to use the telnet interface. play and pause commands work as one expects, however I need a way to figure out if something is currently playing. I've found two commands that look like they should help, but they do not. is_playing is one, but it only returns 0 if playback is stopped, not paused. The other one is the "status" command which always says "( state paused )" no matter what.

So my question is, is there a way to find out if something is playing? Alternatively, is there a way to toggle play/pause without knowing the current status?