gnome-shell-extension-mpris-indicator-button VS playerctl

Mpris Indicator Button is pretty cool too, but seems to lack a hot key to display it.

I also use the mpris indicator extension myself and that particular dev uses Fedora (or sometimes Ubuntu), and they've said in the past they can't update the extension until Gnome 43 hits, so since Fedora is still delayed to mid-November, that extension won't be officially updated just yet. But if you check their GitHub they have a "crude" master update for Gnome 43 you can use if you really want to, but just know it's not release ready yet.

Extensions: Blur my Shell, Tray icons Reloaded, Clipboard indicator, GSconnect, MPRIS Indicator Button, Night Theme Switcher, Color Picker

There are at least two extensions which do that (for Gnome 40): MPRIS Indicator Button and Media Controls.

Since Waterfox is based on Firefox and the MPRIS implementation of the latter seems optimal I suppose something is "missing"(?) in Waterfox sourcecode, I use the "MPRIS Indicator Button" GNOME shell extension and it's always worked flawlessly with Firefox but it never did with Waterfox .

if you dont mind setting up command shortcuts, look into playerctl https://github.com/altdesktop/playerctl

The latest nwg-shell-config update brings a new tab, to configure idle and lock screen settings. Under the hood, it provides the nwg-lock command, which is a wrapper around gtklock or swaylock. It adds a random image background, either local, or downloaded from https://unsplash.com. You may also display an overlay window to control mpris media player with playerctl.

Yes it would be possible to pipe the output into a script/program and parse it to extract the information, but in my opinion not the best solution. Instead you can query information from media players that support MPRIS https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/MPRIS via tools like playerctl https://github.com/altdesktop/playerctl

Playerctl can control the currently active media player.

I think both firefox and vlc support MPRIS, which can be controlled from the command line using playerctl, if you have that installed: ssh name@host playerctl play-pause

You can use playerctl for browsers, spotify and similar players.

VLC (and therefore cvlc as well, I suppose) can be controlled via MPRIS (using playerctl, for example).

My super-duper simple playerctl script that works flawlessly for years to prioritize my media keys to work on Spotify or ncspot over anything else. If I'm listening to Spotify or ncspot, why do I need to control any other stuff with my media keys, right?! Without it, if I have any other mpris player open, which can be a lot of things some not even related to media, my keyboard media keys won't focus on the music players I use for actually listening to music. ncspot doesn't respond to playerctl --player=ncspot play-pause, so I have to detect if it is playing or paused, so I can run playerctl --player=ncspot play or playerctl --player=ncspot pause separately. Script.

Try playerctl.