Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

Playing audio/video/images

The Python standard library provides no utilities to open images, and has limited support for playing audio files.

While it's possible to somehow play audio files in some formats by combining the wave and ossaudiodev or winsound modules, the OSS audio system has long been deprecated on Linux systems and neither of those is available on Mac systems.

For images, it would be possible to show an image using the tkinter module, but we would be constrained to very simple image formats as decoding the images would be on our own.

But there is one little trick we can use to actually display most image files and play most audio files.

On most systems, trying to open a file with the default web browser will by the way play ...