2012-11-06

Gpodder and mplayer

Gpodder downloads podcasts and keeps track of listened podcasts. I wanted to use it with mplayer but can't control mplayer when playing audio as it stays in the background.

Mplayer allows to start it as a slave and then command it via a named pipe.

  • create /usr/local/bin/mplayer-daemon 
#!/bin/bash
#http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/tech/slave.txt
mkfifo /tmp/podcast
mplayer -slave -input file=/tmp/podcast "$1"
  • in gpodder podcasts->preferences set the audio player command to the previous script
  • next you can control mplayer using 'echo <command> > /tmp/podcast'
  • or map keys to some commands