Can I get VLC or other media player to output information to an external program in real time?

Question

My scenario is this:

I want to play a TV show or a movie on some media player. I want to be able to run a custom program that can get real time info - for example, the current timestamp, percentage of video left etc. - from this player.

My aim is that with this program running, I can annotate my video watching experience. Maybe take screencaps at the touch of a button, or mark a timestamp as the onset of a joke or something like that. Can media players be queried for this information while they're playing video? I imagine VLC would be the best bet here.

Answer 1

You can talk to VLC through the VLC HTTP API:

http://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_HTTP_requests

In particular /requests/status.xml has all the playback information that is desired.