Add option to ignore specific player(s)

[ceribik]

It would be nice to have an option to ignore certain players, e.g. VLC.

[acrisci]

You can target a particular player with the --player=PLAYER command-line flag. For instance:

playerctl --player=spotify play

You can see the available players that are running with dbus-send --session --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus --type=method_call --print-reply /org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames and using the name like org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.[PLAYER]

Is that what you had in mind, or did you want some other kind of feature?

[ceribik]

I want the opposite of that. E.g. say I have VLC open and another media player (I use more than one), I want to be able to control anything other than VLC. Alternatively, a way to specify multiple players would be nice (although in retrospect, I suppose you can just run playerctl multiple times)

[vivien]

I think managing whitelist and blacklist may cause headaches. Specifying multiple players as @ceribik mentioned, would be more intuitive. The simplest usage I have in mind would be to specify the --player option multiple times:

playerctl --player xmms2 --player spotify

[acrisci]

I think something like that would make sense for the commands. It should probably send the command to each player specified by the switch.

However, it would be less useful for queries, such as for metadata and volume. I'm not sure how to best handle that case.

[ceribik]

You could always just make it only usable for the control commands.

[acrisci]

Ok, I'm going to do a --ignore-player flag.