I think a little bit of everything is needed.

1. "player -s-" (the second '-' is required!) does stop the player
from receiving input from the serial port.

2. I've been strace'ing what I could but when my program
forks and exec's, strace gets some errors and then future
output seems somewhat untrustable. Also a simple strace
of just the player wields nothing about ttyS1 or console but
after downloading the player and looking inside, there is a
reference after "Server" to "/dev/usb0" and "/dev/ttyS1" but
no console. So I moved ttyS1 to hiddenttyS1 and relinked
the symbolic link from console (so I still get a console!) and
just placed a regular file at ttyS1 for now.

Results:
-"player" fails to start with "Starting Server Failed" on the display.
-"player -s-" will start as normal.

Great, everything is doing what is should do, except...

Even with "player -s-", my program can intercept the player's
stdout/stderr but stdin isn't reaching my program. From a ps
list, the CTTY for the player is ttyp0 as is should be.

Anyhow, I will continue to hack away and try and find out just
where my typed characters are disappearing to. Hopefully I
will have some more positive results for people later.

Brett