NAME Mplayer::NowPlaying - query a running mplayer process for now playing metadata SYNOPSIS use Mplayer::NowPlaying; ... my $current = now_playing; if(exists($current->{artist})) { print "Current artist is $current->{artist}\n"; } DESCRIPTION Mplayer::NowPlaying was born because the author runs mplayer daemonized, controlling it via named pipes. I wanted a simple way to retrieve various 'now playing' metadata for the currently playing song. Mplayer::NowPlaying supports two modes: Normal Start mplayer in normal mode and redirect STDOUT to a file: mplayer *.mp3 > ./mplayer_log Get the current song title: # 'normal' argument optional; this is the default my $now_playing = now_playing("$ENV{HOME}/mplayer.log", 'normal'); printf("Current song is %s\n", $now_playing->{title}); Mplayer produces a lot of output in normal mode, effectively making our metadata retrieval slow very fast (10 songs played or so). Therefore it's really recommended to use identify mode. Identify Start mplayer with the -identify switch: mplayer -identify *.mp3 > mplayer_log or the preferred mplayer -quiet -msglevel all=0 -identify *.mp3 > mplayer_log Get the current song title: # note 'identify' argument my $now_playing = now_playing("$ENV{HOME}/mplayer.log", 'identify'); printf("Current song is %s\n", $now_playing->{title}); By using -msglevel all=0 -identify the amount of output from mplayer is reduced to a minimum, making the retrieval very fast. This is recommended. EXPORTS now_playing() Parameters: ($logfile | $filehandle), ($mode) Returns: \%metadata my %metadata = %{ now_playing($logfile, 'identify'); }; my $artist = $metadata{artist}; now_playing() takes two arguments (the last one optional): * The logfile (or filehandle) output from mplayer is directed to * 'normal' or 'identify' mode. Normal is the default. The hash will be filled with the available metadata for the current media. A typical result might look like: album => "Me and Simon", artist => "Laleh", audio => 44100, bitrate => 128000, channels => 2, chapters => 0, codec => "mp3", demuxer => "audio", file => "~/Laleh-Me_and_Simon/01-big_city_love.mp3", format => 85, genre => 1, id => 0, length => "1288.00", seekable => 1, start => "0.00", title => "Big city love", year => 2009 Possible keys include: title artist album year comment genre bitrate codec format id channels chapters audio demuxer length seekable, start file AUTHOR Magnus Woldrich CPAN ID: WOLDRICH magnus@trapd00r.se http://japh.se COPYRIGHT Copyright 2011 Magnus Woldrich . This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. SEE ALSO mplayer(1)