MPlayer has an LIRC interface, and a "STDIN" interface. One of these may
Oops...I just found the -slave option, which does exactly what I need, combined with unix PIPES. Sorry for asking something already in the docs.
I'd be inclined to use mplayer on X (XVideo). You can then open an ordinary X window on top of mplayer. Make the background the chroma-key
Excellent suggestion.
3) The ability to stop MPlayer, exit it all together, then come back in at the exact spot we left off - this would require mplayer to save it's state...
Yep - I'd like that feature, too. Perhaps you'd like to try implementing it for us...?
I'll see what I can do. Lets try this on for an implementation of it: mplayer -savestate [filename] The -savestate option tells mplayer to store the state of the currently running movie/DVD into the given filename when it is terminated before the program/movie is complete. If filename is not specified, it defaults to $HOME/.mplayer/mplayer.state. We could also create a cmd that mplayer understands which saves state when you haven't provided the -savestate option. It seems fairly straightforward, is this an acceptable implementation? I'll have to dig into the mplayer code further to figure out how to get current running_time. Mplayer could then be started with the -ss command reading input from that file. The implementation is not without it's quirks - for example you switch DVD's in the middle and use the -savestate option, then if you start with the -ss option, it will resume the new movie at the TIME you stopped the old movie. The controlling program, by passing the [filename] could figure out a way to fix this, but the "default" of mplayer.state could instead be: $HOME/.mplayer/mplayer.state.DVD, $HOME/.mplayer/mplayer.state.<FILE>, etc If we could get a MD5SUM on the first <N> seconds of input (clean because it helps to identify the input, bad because MPlayer would have to save the data to generate the sum. But then we could use mplayer.state.MD5 - then we could do mplayer -resumestate, mplayer would calculate the MD5SUM, then figure out where to advance to. If no statefile exists, it would just play from beginning. Thanks for the help with my other questions. -- Brian Hayward