[bug] Playerctl is too restrictive in matching a media player instance

[xPMo]

I use KDEConnect, which permits me to remotely control media in-between my laptop/desktop/phone.

However, the player names reported by playerctl are like the following:

$ playerctl -l
kdeconnect.mpris_e3c8035c2d55bf42ff347d4b0a60f4ac
kdeconnect.mpris_da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890
kdeconnect.mpris_afd807095922a35fd0fd40b59abcf27c
strawberry

It is unwieldy to specify the full strings for these players. Multiple players from a single remote host will show up as multiple kdeconnect.mpris_[hash] on the local host. Also, Firefox uses something like firefox.instance[num].

Suggested solution:

Implement glob matching for player lists. Interpret playerctl -i 'kdeconnect.*,firefox.*' to ignore all matching players.

This kind of matching could also be useful in -p to specify preferences but allow any player to be controlled:

playerctl -p 'strawberry,spotify,*'   # prefer local strawberry and spotify, but if neither exists, control the first available player

Is this in-scope, or is scripting on the output of playerctl -l preferred?

Thank you!

[acrisci]

For multiple instances, there's a part of the mpris specification for that kdeconnect should be using here. They should be specifying their instances with kdeconnect.mpris.instance[ID]. In that case, playerctl will match any instance when you specify kdeconnect.mpris or a specific instance if the full name is given.

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/mpris-spec/2.2/

In the case where the media player allows multiple instances running simultaneously, each additional instance should request a unique bus name, adding a dot and a unique identifier to its usual bus name, such as one based on a UNIX process id. For example, this could be:

org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.vlc.instance7389

Make an issue with them asking to implement this part of the spec.

As for your suggested solution, this is already implemented with the special player name %any which matches any player not given explicitly in the list. Try this:

playerctl -p strawberry,spotify,%any

There's also playerctld which can be used to select the last active player.

With all of these options to select players, I don't think general globbing is useful when players follow the instance spec.

[xPMo]

They should be specifying their instances with kdeconnect.mpris.instance[ID]. In that case, playerctl will match any instance when you specify kdeconnect.mpris or a specific instance if the full name is given.

I answered my followup question by searching the code for ".instance". Thanks for linking that. I'll go see about reporting it upstream.

... %any ...

Thanks for that as well.

[xPMo]

I was looking to open the bug against KDEConnect, but I realized the specification doesn't require instanceN, just that the unique identifier is preceded with a period and only contains [a-z][A-Z][0-9]_-. So kdeconnect.mpris_2743f90f62ea442297cd4aa5e1809724 does match the specification and should be matched by -p kdeconnect.

[acrisci]

Oh ok I think it would be safe to drop the instance requirement after the dot.