Named piped for STDIN to control movie player

Question

I had this working, but for the life of me I can no longer figure out why I can't use this named pipe to control a movie player (ie. mplayer, vlc, omxplayer...) via commands from different local terminals.

Terminal/ssh session 1:

user@computer1$ mkfifo /path/of/pipe
user@computer1$ tail -f /dev/null > /path/of/pipe

Terminal/ssh session 2:

user@computer1$ cat /path/of/pipe | {mplayer,vlc,omxplayer} /path/of/video

Terminal/ssh session 3:

user@computer1$ echo -n q > /path/of/pipe

Answer 1

Turns out what had changed was not the command(s), but something about the pipe. My guess is that I issued a tail -f /dev/null > /path/of/pipe which did not close for some reason. Once I deleted the pipe and created it again (or used a different pipe), the problem went away.