Play an audio file using FFMPEG, PortAudio, and Python

ffmpeg-pyaudio.py

# FFMPEG example of Blocking Mode Audio I/O https://people.csail.mit.edu/hubert/pyaudio/docs/

"""PyAudio Example: Play a wave file."""

import pyaudio
import wave
import sys
import subprocess

CHUNK = 1024

if len(sys.argv) < 2:
    print("Plays an audio file.\n\nUsage: %s filename.wav" % sys.argv[0])
    sys.exit(-1)

song = subprocess.Popen(["ffmpeg.exe", "-i", sys.argv[1], "-loglevel", "panic", "-vn", "-f", "s16le", "pipe:1"],
                        stdout=subprocess.PIPE)

# instantiate PyAudio (1)
p = pyaudio.PyAudio()

# open stream (2)
stream = p.open(format=pyaudio.paInt16,
                channels=2,         # use ffprobe to get this from the file beforehand
                rate=44100,         # use ffprobe to get this from the file beforehand
                output=True)

# read data
data = song.stdout.read(CHUNK)

# play stream (3)
while len(data) > 0:
    stream.write(data)
    data = song.stdout.read(CHUNK)

# stop stream (4)
stream.stop_stream()
stream.close()

# close PyAudio (5)
p.terminate()

I found using a simple one-liner os.popen call to ffplay which is bundled with ffmpeg works well.

Are there any advantages of using pyaudio over just that? Ffplay sure seems easier, but I'm not sure if it is the better solution