Control VLC from Python in Windows

I'm running VLC (a media player) in Windows 7. Is there way to control (as in: play, pause, 开发者_StackOverflow社区set volume) a running instance of VLC from Python?

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Yes, you can control it via telnet (with telnetlib). There are also libvlc bindings, but I'm not sure you can use that to control an existing VLC instance.

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As a general alternative to already mentioned solutions it's good to know about pywinauto

UPDATE:

Check out swapy for a way to with pywinauto more easily.