MPRIS

MPRIS (Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification) is a standard D-Bus interface which aims to provide a common programmatic API for controlling media players.

It provides a mechanism for discovery, querying and basic playback control of compliant media players, as well as a track list interface which is used to add context to the active media item.

Supported clients

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason: You can see your player of choice and check if it supports mpris with playerctl utility. In case it does, add it to the following list. (Discuss in Talk:MPRIS)

celluloid
Chromium
deadbeef^AUR (using deadbeef-mpris2-plugin^AUR)
Dragon Player
Firefox
gmusicbrowser^AUR
guayadeque^AUR
mpv#mpv-mpris
Music Player Daemon/Tips and tricks#MPRIS support
ncspot^AUR
rage
smf-dsp-git^AUR
Spotify#MPRIS
Telegram
VLC

Control utilities

Tip: Create a key binding for common control commands and multimedia keys such as XF86AudioPlay, XF86AudioStop, XF86AudioPrev and XF86AudioNext.

Playerctl

The playerctl utility provides a command line tool to send commands to MPRIS clients. The most common commands are play-pause, next and previous:

$ playerctl play-pause
$ playerctl next
$ playerctl previous

playerctl will send the command to the first player it finds. To select a player manually, use the --player option, e.g. --player=vlc. For better automation playerctl comes with a daemon that keeps track of media player activity and directs commands to the one with most recent activity. You can spun it into the background with:

$ playerctld daemon

In order to start playerctld when you log in, you may create the following systemd/User service:

~/.config/systemd/user/playerctld.service

[Unit]
Description=Keep track of media player activity

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/bin/playerctld daemon

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

You should then enable the service with the --user flag.

mpris-player-control

The mpris_player_control is a shell script which integrates dbus-send and pactl to control MPRIS clients. It supports the Play, Pause, PlayPause and Stop actions and sink volume control (mute/unmute/up/down) for Spotify.

Run mpris_player_control -h to show basic script usage.

D-Bus

An alternative to the above is to manually use D-Bus, which should be available by default as it is a dependency of systemd.

For example, the following commands can be used to control Spotify:

$ dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.PlayPause
$ dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Next
$ dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Previous
$ dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Stop

Bluetooth

Media control from bluetooth headsets and similar devices may be forwarded to MPRIS.

Note: Some headphones such as Sony WH-1000XM3 provide an AVRCP interface. For these types mpris-proxy is not required. Just make sure you have key bindings set up for media keys.

Install the bluez-utils package and run mpris-proxy. In order to start up mpris-proxy in the background and/or when your system starts, you may create a systemd/User service:

~/.config/systemd/user/mpris-proxy.service

[Unit]
Description=Forward bluetooth media controls to MPRIS

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mpris-proxy

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Then start/enable the service with the --user flag.