If you were looking for a tool to rule all your media players from the command line, look no further. There are some interesting utilities to control several popular players with simple commands, regardless of which one. For example, one of those tools is playerctl, which can work from the terminal with simple commands in text mode for different multimedia players, including Audacious, bmp, Spotify, Mplayer, VLC and xMMS.
For installation You can use the package management tools of your preferred distribution, since it is usually included in the most famous official repositories. For example, you can install it with pacman if you have an Arch distro or based on it, using APT for Debian and derivatives, zypper for openSUSE and dnf for Fedora ... Once installed, you can use it in a simple way. I recommend you to see the manual to know more, but basically you can list the players with:
playerctl -l
For example, if it appears in the vlc list, and we want control usage From this, we can use the following commands to see the status, play a track, pause it, move the track forward or backward, and stop it respectively:
playerctl status vlc playerctl play -p vlc playerctl pause vlc playerctl next vlc playerctl previous vlc placyerctl stop vlc
You already know that if instead of wanting to control VLC we want to do it with another, it would be the same command but substituting vlc for the name of the player we want ... By the way, you can also use another alternative called omnipause If you are interested, it is also a Python-based app that controls the players through DBus.