Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification
The Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification (MPRIS) is a standard D-Bus interface which aims to provide a common programmatic API for controlling media players.
It provides a mechanism for discovery, querying and basic playback control of compliant media players, as well as a tracklist interface which is used to add context to the active media item.
View the specification
The specification can be viewed online. The latest version is 2.2.
All versions with the same major number (eg: 2.x) are backwards compatible.
Version 1 of the specification is fatally flawed and should not be used.
Specification source
The specification is maintained as D-Bus introspection XML annotated with Telepathy extensions. It can be found in a git repository along with tooling to build the HTML version of the specification.
Mailing list
Discussion happens at mpris@lists.freedesktop.org.
Archives from 2011 and earlier can be found on the VideoLAN site.
Testing
In order to check that your media player conforms to the specification, one of the developers of MPRIS has created a compliance-testing tool. It can be found on GitHub.