python-mpv is a ctypes-based python interface to the mpv media player. It gives you more or less full control of all features of the player, just as the lua interface does.

pip install python-mpv

...though you can also realistically just copy mpv.py into your project as it's all nicely contained in one file.

libmpv.so either locally (in your current working directory) or somewhere in your system library search path. This module is somewhat lenient as far as libmpv versions are concerned but since libmpv is changing quite frequently you'll only get all the newest features when using an up-to-date version of this module. The unit tests for this module do some basic automatic version compatibility checks. If you discover anything missing here, please open an issue or submit a pull request on github.

The master branch officially only supports recent python releases (3.5 onwards), but there is the somewhat outdated but functional py2compat branch providing Python 2 compatibility.

import mpv
player = mpv.MPV(ytdl=True)
player.play('https://youtu.be/DOmdB7D-pUU')

The mpv module starts one thread for event handling, since MPV sends events that must be processed quickly. The event queue has a fixed maxmimum size and some operations can cause a large number of events to be sent.

If you want to handle threading yourself, you can pass start_event_thread=False to the MPV constructor and manually call the MPV object's _loop function. If you have some strong need to not use threads and use some external event loop (such as asyncio) instead you can do that, too with some work. The API of the backend C libmpv has a function for producing a sort of event file descriptor for a handle. You can use that to produce a file descriptor that can be passed to an event loop to tell it to wake up the python-mpv event handler on every incoming event.

All API functions are thread-safe. If one is not, please file an issue on github.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import mpv

def my_log(loglevel, component, message):
    print('[{}] {}: {}'.format(loglevel, component, message))

player = mpv.MPV(log_handler=my_log, ytdl=True, input_default_bindings=True, input_vo_keyboard=True)

# Property access, these can be changed at runtime
@player.property_observer('time-pos')
def time_observer(_name, value):
    # Here, _value is either None if nothing is playing or a float containing
    # fractional seconds since the beginning of the file.
    print('Now playing at {:.2f}s'.format(value))

player.fullscreen = True
player.loop_playlist = 'inf'
# Option access, in general these require the core to reinitialize
player['vo'] = 'opengl'

@player.on_key_press('q')
def my_q_binding():
    print('THERE IS NO ESCAPE')

@player.on_key_press('s')
def my_s_binding():
    pillow_img = player.screenshot_raw()
    pillow_img.save('screenshot.png')

player.play('https://youtu.be/DLzxrzFCyOs')
player.wait_for_playback()

del player

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import mpv

player = mpv.MPV(ytdl=True, input_default_bindings=True, input_vo_keyboard=True)

player.playlist_append('https://youtu.be/PHIGke6Yzh8')
player.playlist_append('https://youtu.be/Ji9qSuQapFY')
player.playlist_append('https://youtu.be/6f78_Tf4Tdk')

player.playlist_pos = 0

while True:
    # To modify the playlist, use player.playlist_{append,clear,move,remove}. player.playlist is read-only
    print(player.playlist)
    player.wait_for_playback()

The general aim is PEP 8, with liberal application of the "consistency" section. 120 cells line width. Four spaces. No tabs. Probably don't bother making pure-formatting PRs except if you think it really helps readability or it really irks you if you don't.