A better way to pause

April 10, 2009 11:03 AM

I'm looking for a way to pause/unpause VLC using the middle mouse button even if VLC doesn't have focus. Any ideas?

I often use VLC to play one-off audio files, podcasts and such. The system is a media PC hooked up to a big-screen TV in my living room. I'll frequently start playing a file remotely from my den using a screen-sharing app, then listen to it in the living room. I like to avoid having to constantly turn the TV off and on solely to press pause.

So using a utility called X-Mouse Utility Control I've configured all middle-button clicks to be converted into a Enter key click, and I've configured VLC to recognize Enter as pause/unpause.

Problem is this all breaks down when VLC doesn't have focus. Is there any way to make this work when some other app has focus? Or another utility or program that would work better?

This is on Windows Vista.

posted by aerotive to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Top of the head guess is that you would want to look into some scripting/automation package for Vista and Middle Click run a macro and that macro would consist of finding the running VLC instance and sending the "Enter" keystroke to that application.
posted by mmascolino at 11:27 AM on April 10, 2009

Not quite what you asked, but Foobar has built-in support for global hotkeys.

I've configured Ctrl-Space as pause/unpause, so I can start/stop MP3 playback regardless of what's in focus.
posted by Adam_S at 11:41 AM on April 10, 2009

Best answer: Adam_S has it, you're looking for "Global Hotkeys". Of course 'Enter' probably won't work well as a global hotkey, but you should be able to reprogram your remote to send what you want.

Glancing at the forums, it looks like the Windows version has had global hotkeys since mid-2008, at least as a plugin.

Try updating to a new version.

This forum is where I got the info: http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=18350&start=90
posted by mad bomber what bombs at midnight at 11:57 AM on April 10, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks much, that plugin is just what I was looking for. I will need to find find something similar to x-mouse that has more key combos available, as "Enter" indeed doesn't work well as a global hotkey (as you noted). So as a workaround I changed the hotkey to "Escape", which works well enough; this is a media pc and I very rarely use that key with it.
posted by aerotive at 1:22 PM on April 10, 2009

If you have an iphone, there's a VLC remote.
posted by ph00dz at 6:29 PM on April 10, 2009