mrc

Fast, robust and experimental JSON IPC wrapper for the mpv video player; comes with a wrapper library, a CLI and a server for remote control.

Hacking

Both CLI and server utilities require mpv to be started with the IPC socket enabled.

mpv --idle --input-ipc-server=/tmp/mpvsocket

mrc does not handle TLS certificates for you. To run the remote control server, you must create your own PKCS#12 certificates using OpenSSL.

openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout key.pem -out cert.pem -days 365
openssl pkcs12 -export -out identity.pfx -inkey key.pem -in cert.pem

mrc then read the TLS_PFX_PATH and TLS_PASSWORD environment variables to load them. You should also set AUTH_TOKEN for making authenticated requests to the server remotely. Running without an auth token is "supported", but the server will not fully function.

export TLS_PFX_PATH=/path/to/identity.pfx
export TLS_PASSWORD="your_identity_passphrase"
export AUTH_TOKEN="your_auth_token"

Then start the server with cargo run --bin=server.

How you handle environment is up to you, Systemd makes it somewhat easy if running mrc as a service.

Testing mpv IPC socket

If you suspect some IPC commands are not being sent properly, try sending them manually first with something like socat.

echo '{ "command": ["pause"] }' | socat - /tmp/mpvsocket