I'm looking for a modern and efficient workflow to do this to hopefully avoid reinventing the wheel.

1. Gather Houdini's current playback time.
1a. Perhaps gather it in increments, every so often?
2. Send this time to a background or external process
3. Have this process listen and base it's operation on seeking this current time
4. Send other information to this process, perhaps an external file, preferably without an external file.

Just a few random tinkerings on my own. The pipe-out CHOP does indeed work. And I have it sending to a network port on Windows. But preferably I would be sending this with python out of sops. The key here is that I wouldn't want it to lock up my system. If there was a way to query Houdini from the outside, that would be amazing.