MusicController

A simple script to control media on webpages using the MPRIS API. The C app waits for DBus connections and upon receipt sends their messages on to background.js, which reads the message and injects javascript into certain pages to perform the required actions

To Install

• Build app/music_controller with gcc -o music_controller music_controller.c $(pkg-config --libs --cflags dbus-1) -pthread
• Modify app/music_controller.json so the path points to your installation
• Copy app/music_controller.json to ~/.mozilla/native-messaging-hosts/
• Install the extension from about:debugging

To Use

Use DBus to send commands to MusicController. I use dbus-send, like so:

dbus-send --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.musiccontroller --type=method_call --print-reply /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Pause

DBus endpoints are Play, Pause, PlayPause, Next, Previous

This can also be automated. There are a couple simple examples for cli interfaces in different languanges in /controllers, so it would be relatively simple to adapt one into a custom script. One could also choose to bind keyboard keys to trigger media events, so for instance an i3 keybind would look like

bindsym XF86AudioPause exec --no-startup-id dbus-send --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.musiccontroller --type=method_call --print-reply /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Pause

Commands for the controllers are togglepause, pause, play, next, prev

In addition, because we implement the MPRIS API, several third party controllers ought to work out of the box. This setup is tested only against mpris-proxy, but it works well.