VLCControl.scpt - Control VLC in OS X Terminal

This is a AppleScript for controlling VLC through Terminal.app.

The scenario for which it was originally designed is controlling VLC, which is playing on a Mac, via ssh, while working on a Linux computer on the other side of the room.

Currently supported functions are: play/pause, next/previous track, jumping in time, toggling fullscreen and changing volume. This pretty much covers everything the AppleScript hooks of VLC allow.

Tested to work on MacOS Monterey and VLC 3.0.18. No guarantees.

You may use, adapt, modify etc. any way you want.

Installation

I am assuming that if you need to control VLC through the terminal you know enough about terminal usage.

The simplest way to install the script is just to just download the script file from the GitHub page and add the line alias vlc="osascript /path/to/VLCControl.scpt" in your .profile.

If you have git, even simpler will be to clone this repository with git clone git://github.com/jeroenbegyn/VLCControl.git and then edit .profile as above. This will also make it easy to keep up to date with possible updates to the script.

Usage

• To start VLC playback, type vlc start or vlc play. If you do this locally and VLC is not running, it will start.
• To pause VLC playback, type vlc pause.
• To stop VLC playback, type vlc stop.
• To go to the next track, type vlc next.
• To go to the previous track, type vlc previous or vlc prev.
• To print information about the currently playing track, type vlc info
• To jump to a particular time in the track, type vlc jump N, where N is the track position in seconds.
• To fast forward, type vlc forward N where N is the number of seconds to jump ahead.
• To rewind, type vlc rewind N where N is the number of seconds to jump backwards.
• To change volume, type vlc volume N where N is a number between 0 and 100.
• To show a list of these commands, just type vlc.

Over SSH

To enable the SSH server on OS X, go to Sharing in the System Preferences and enable Remote Login. The Sharing screen will also then tell you the command to use to connect to your Mac in the local network.