[MPlayer-dev-eng] Slave mode and pipes

[murban]

I have been thinking about writing a front-end for mplayer, so I've 
experimented with a very simple program. Unfortunately, I can't get mplayer 
to respond to the commands that I send to its standard input.

The program below I adapted from the GNU glibc manual documenting the use of 
pipes and popen(). It should spawn a copy of mplayer in slave mode, wait 10 
seconds, cause mplayer to quit and print a message to that effect for the 
user, wait another 5 seconds, and stop. The program does start mplayer, but 
it is not able to get mplayer to respond to commands.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(void)
{
	FILE *stream;
	int i;
	
	stream = popen("mplayer -slave /tmp/myvid.mpg", "w");
	if (stream == NULL)
	{
		fprintf(stderr, "Failure starting mplayer\n");
		return EXIT_FAILURE;
	}
	

	sleep(10);
	fprintf(stream, "quit\n");
	printf("Stopping\n");
	sleep(5);
	

 	if (pclose(stream) != 0) 	{
 		fprintf(stderr, "Error closing mplayer\n");
	 }
	
	return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}