Don't know how user friendly you'd like this to be, but VLC has a text-based remote control interface: https://wiki.videolan.org/documentation:modules/rc/ https

Don't know how user friendly you'd like this to be, but VLC has a text-based remote control interface: https://wiki.videolan.org/documentation:modules/rc/ https://wiki.videolan.org/documentation:modules/rc/ This allows you to e.g. get the current time (get_time) and pause playback (pause). So you just have to write a small script that issues the commands the way you want and you'll be good.