[Warner306]

It's what I'm trying, you're right.    

Whether or not you get it working, I would be curious in what the challenges are to update DSPlayer to v18. For example, how many merge conflicts have to be dealt with?  

If this is because of the limitation where a kodi instance will not open while other is running, this is easily fixable just commenting a few lines of code and compiling it. 
If this is the case, let me know and I'll compile a nightly without this limitation. 

I didn't understand this part. I'm not sure how popular DSPlayer as an external player would be. It would depend on how fast it opened and closed. Would it go straight to the player window?