My friend and I are in the processes of planning a new media controller project in PHP. We basically want to write our own web front end for a media player, but we need some help finding the actual player to power it. Our ideal media player would do the following:

1) Run from Command Line
2) Be able to accept triggers (play, pause, stop, next,) while running
3) Support Multiple Instances
4) Be able to assign a particular sound card to a specific instance (for multiple outputs)
5) Play files via URIs

Our eventual plan is to be able to control multiple output zones in a house via a wireless handheld device (Windows Mobile Phone). And it will be fun to do all of the custom PHP coding. Our big hangup is trying to find the media player to act as the back end for it. The biggest hurdle right now is finding one that we can assign a sound card to a specific instance.

any ideas would be grately appreciated.