is there anyway aside from hitting q in terminal mode to kill the player? i've tried to just use kill -9 pid but it always restarts.

You can gracefully stop the player with "kill -INT <player-pid>"
and restart it with "kill -HUP <bash-pid>". Or use killall from
debian to automatically find the pid.

Another way to stop and start the player is to use hijack:
http://player-ip/?NODATA&SERIAL=q will stop the player,
http://player-ip/?NODATA&SERIAL=exit will start it.

You would need wget or something to do this from the player,
but there might be a more direct way to have hijack emulate
serial input. Anyone?

Pim