Some experiments with D-bus programming. Goal is to control and get info from the mediaplayer VLC. A script to get the songinfo from VLC: #!/bin/bash while [ 1 ] do info=$(dbus-send --print-reply --type=method_call --dest=org.mpris.vlc /Player org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.GetMetadata $@|grep variant|grep string|sed 's/^.\+"\(.\+\)"/\1/'|grep -v http) dt=$(date) echo $info $dt echo $info-$dt > /home/patrik/vlcInfo.txt sleep 10 done The text is printed to vlcInfo.txt and then used by a screensaver that shows the info. VLC must be launched like "vlc --control dbus". This script can only be used locally, ie in the same session. If we run VLC in one session (say in X locally) and then connects via SSH, we can't connext to that d-bus. A work-around is to find the other sessions d-bus-address and set it in our ssh-session. Get Pid of VLC: PID=$(pidof vlc) Set d-bus-address: DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=`grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS \ /proc/$PID/environ | \ sed -e 's/DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=//'` Export: export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS Run command as the user running VLC: su patrik -c "dbus-send --print-reply --type=method_call --dest=org.mpris.vlc /Player org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.GetMetadata" Then som cut & grap to get important info: dbus-send --print-reply --type=method_call --dest=org.mpris.vlc /Player org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.GetMetadata |grep -A 1 nowplaying|grep variant|cut -d "\"" -f2- Lionel Ritchie - Endless Love (1981)"