As JBernardo mentioned in a comment, separate the "-bufsize 4096" argument into two, "-bufsize", "4096". Each argument needs to be separated when subprocess.call is used with shell=False (the default). You can also specify shell=True and give the whole command as a single string, but this is not recommended due to potential security vulnerabilities.
You should not need to use string formatting where you have "%s" % url. If url is a string, pass it directly, otherwise call str(url) to get a string representation.
As JBernardo mentioned in a comment, separate the "-bufsize 4096" argument into two, "-bufsize", "4096". Each argument needs to be separated when subprocess.call is used with shell=False (the default). You can also specify shell=True and give the whole command as a single string, but this is not recommended due to potential security vulnerabilities.
You should not need to use string formatting where you have "%s" % url. If url is a string, pass it directly, otherwise call str(url) to get a string representation.
This is the way to go:
url = 'http://www.whatever.com'
cmd = 'ffplay -vn -nodisp -bufsize 4096 '.split()
subprocess.call(cmd + [str(url)], shell=False)