Arch Linux

whoops

Member

Registered: 2009-03-19

Posts: 891

Stop VLC from grabbing play button / CDPLAY?

Hi!

After each boot, at first, the CDPLAY button on my headset works just fine out of the box with most applicable programs as long as the application window has focus (I mainly use it with multiple instances of smplayer) - and I like it that way because it lets me select where the button presses go.

After starting VLC, the CDPLAY button only affects VLC player, even if another application has  focus or the vlc window is on a different desktop. After I quit vlc, the button stops working at all (except for vlc - still - once I start that again).

I get:

root[PID] ACPI group/action undefined: cd/play / CDPLAY

... warnings in my journal every time I press the button, regardless of wether it currently works or not... so since the button works although ACPI doesn't know what to do, I guess there's a different route this takes as a "normal" keyboard event of sorts. The device recognized is a: "input: Logitech Logitech G930 Headset as /devices/pci0000:00/.../input/input25".

Does anyone know how vlc breaks / permanently grabs this button or how to stop it from doing that?
I looked through all the vlc settings and found nothing. Tried restarting smplayer, but it doesn't start working again. The "global" key bindings settings in vlc, which according to some sources should be responsible for this behaviour, all are empty and setting them to something else does not change the behaviour of the play button. The problem also persists after I physically dis+re-connect the headset.

( The previous / next track buttons work and break exactly the same way. The volume buttons always seem to be "owned" by kmix, which is fine by me. )

edit: for now, I assigned super+keyboard keys to the actions in smplayer and wrote this as a temporary workaround:

#!/bin/bash
acpi_listen | while read a; do \
	echo $a | grep play && xte 'keydown Super_L' 'key P' 'keyup Super_L';
	echo $a | grep CDPREV && xte 'keydown Super_L' 'key 9' 'keyup Super_L';
	echo $a | grep CDNEXT && xte 'keydown Super_L' 'key 0' 'keyup Super_L';
done;

... but I'd still rather have the buttons working for real

Last edited by whoops (2015-07-04 09:20:41)