Phonon and VLC Player Tools

These tools allow media files in any supported format to be played through either the KDE Phonon sound system, or directly via the VLC libraries, from the command line. They may be useful for either playing sounds from shell scripts, or for debugging sound output.

The package and all the files contained in it is licensed under the GNU GPL V3+; see the file LICENSE for more information.

Requirements

To build the tools the KDE Frameworks 5, Phonon and VLC libraries are required. CMake is also required, but there is no need for Autotools.

Building and installing

Assuming that you have the requirements as above installed or already provided by your distro, go to a suitable build location (e.g. your home directory) and do:

 git clone https://github.com/martenjj/phononplay.git
 cd phononplay
 mkdir build
 cd build
 cmake ..
 make
 sudo make install

Running

The commands phononplay and vlcplay will be available. In their simplest invocation, specify a media file to be played, for example:

$ phononplay ring.mp3
$ vlcplay ring.mp3

Each command has a listing mode which will show the available output devices:

$ phononplay -l
0    alsa:default:CARD=SB
     HDA ATI SB, ALC888 Analog Default Audio Device
1    alsa:null
     Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
2    alsa:sysdefault:CARD=SB
     HDA ATI SB, ALC888 Analog Default Audio Device
3    alsa:default
     Default
$ vlcplay -D
Available VLC output devices for module 'alsa':
0    null
     Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
1    default:CARD=SB
     HDA ATI SB, ALC888 Analog Default Audio Device
2    sysdefault:CARD=SB
     HDA ATI SB, ALC888 Analog Default Audio Device
3    default
     Default

An output device can be specified to direct the sound output to the appropriate device. The device can be a name or a device index as listed by the commands above:

$ phononplay -d alsa:sysdefault:CARD=SB ring.mp3
$ vlcplay -d 2 ring.mp3

Each command also has a help mode (using the option -h) which will show the command syntax and all available options.

Problems?

Please raise an issue on GitHub (at http://github.com/martenjj/phononplay) if there are any problems with installing or using this package.

Thanks for your interest!

Jonathan Marten, http://github.com/martenjj