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?

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.

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.