MPVMediaControl

This tool adds SMTC feature to mpv player, it communicates with mpv by named pipe, and can be controlled by any other programs.

Screenshot on Windows 11 22000 (It's much more useable than the one in 10)

Features

• Media metadata display including title and artist information
• Thumbnail generated from mpv screenshot or youtube cover image
• Media controls (play/pause, prev, next)

Usage

Put notify_media.lua in mpv's scripts directory and place MPVMediaControl.exe to ~~/bin.

You can change the default settings via the notify_media.conf file.

A Reset SMTC item in menu will reset the state of SMTC, useful when Windows is glitched and controls are not working properly (e.g. not displaying or disappearing).

For retrieving youtube cover image, curl.exe is used. It has been bundled in Windows 10 since 1803, or actually build 17063. So if you are using older versions of Windows, you may need to manually download and put curl.exe into $PATH.

Protocol

This tool listens on a named pipe called mpvmcsocket, and receives commands through this protocol:

[commandName](param1=value1)(param2=value2)...

e.g.

[setState](pid=1000)(playing=true)

Commands

• setFile: set currently playing file
• setShot: set screenshot file path
• setState: set player state (playing or not)
• setQuit: notify the tool that player has quit, and the SMTC should be cleared

Parameters

• Common parameters
  • pid={num}: the player's pid. This is a mandatory parameter for every command, it is used to identify different instances.
  • socket_name={String}: the name of MPV's input-ipc-server socket. This is mandatory for every command, and the value is directly the name string.
    • Though Windows allows Unicode named pipes, it will make things more complex and I didn't see any benefits to use non-ASCII characters.
• Parameters for setFile
  • title={hexString}: the title of the media file
  • artist={hexString}: the artist of the media file, music files only. The value can be empty.
  • path={hexString}: the path of the media file
  • type={music,video,image}: the type of the media file
• Parameters for setShot
  • shot_path={hexString}: the path of the thumbnail image file. The value can be empty.

The hexString mentioned above means the original string should be encoded to hex, e.g. Hello <=> 48656C6C6F

• Parameters for setState
  • playing={bool}: if the media is being played, true for playing, false for pausing
• Parameters for setQuit
  • quit=true: this is always true if you want to quit

The media control part works by sending commands to mpv's ipc socket, which notify_media.lua will set mpv to listen on, with the configured socket_name in notify_media.conf.