The VideoLAN Forums

Hello people!

I'll put the issue itself upfront, then explain some background:

I need a way of grabbing a hold of the libvlc object, and any and all of its' children, of an already running VLC media player on Windows 7, Windows 10 and Linux. How can this be done?

To explain why I need to do this: I am planning a personal project to solve a quality of life issue of mine, and one of requirements for this project is a way to have another program (a constantly running-in-the-background listener type deal) to give simple commands to do some things. Namely pause, unpause, fast forward, rewind, add to playlist and remove from playlist. I need to be able to have my listener either tell an already running instance of the media player to do these things, or alternatively have the listener start up an instance of VLC media player if it isn't running.

Hope people made some sense of this. I know there are VLC remote apps for android and I probably could save a lot of headache by just using that, but I want to do this from the ground up as a personal project and something I can learn from and add to my portfolio later. Any help is greatly appreciated.

On Linux, you can use the MPRIS interface. Across all desktop platforms, there's also the HTTP interface.