[FIXED] Multimedia keys

[kulakov]

Hi.
I tried the player, Ok, I got some notes on multimedia keys implementation for you. I could make the player react at the keys in the right way (almost), and yes, I did read the others topics on multimedia keys. My suggestions:

1. BSPlayer only reacts at the keys when it has focus. But that's the best part of it that for ex. WMP always reacts at them! You don't have to do anything except press that pause key for ex. and then just go away. When you're back all you have to do is press play, no application switching. And reacting at the keys only when being focused is in fact nothing better than reacting at hotkeys / mouse. You may say some other applications may need that input too, and you don't want to conflict. That is possible but unlikely and at least you might give users an option to always react at MM keys.

2. I think that inital support for MM keys should be on by default. It's quite strange that people have to go to some preferences to just set that play means play, pause means pause, stop means stop etc. That's quite obvious. Not all keyboards have the keys but you do have 2 fields. You could use the 1st for a regular key and the 2nd for a MM key.

3. BSPlayer does not understand that Play and Pause MAY have the same key code. It says "the key is already used by Pause" if I assign it to Play. Yet it does remember the code and reacts properly. I may cheat on it by using 1st field for Pause and 2nd field for Play for the same key so it won't give me a warning but that doesn't matter - the keys are saved and BSPlayer reacts at them.

4. BSPlayer does not select the right action when I press Play and it is not playing anything. It thinks I pressed Pause. So it switches from "stop" to "pause". Then, if I press Play it does play. Duting playback, Pause/Play work correctly. So, when I press Play/Pause, it checks if it's paused, and if yes it plays otherwise it pauses. But when it's stopped it should play as well.

[Tizio]

1. You can check the "Global key" checkbox to enable system wide shortcuts (that work also when BSplayer is not the active window)

2. Good suggestion

3. This option can be added to BSplayer, and yes, it would be really useful (also my notebook has the MM keys with Play/Pause on the same button)
Maybe by adding a check box with the caption "Play and Pause use the same shortcut" (in this case only Play, or only Pause keydefinition will be considered)
But I don't know if BSP authors will implement this

4. This happens because you set the same button to two actions (as you stated at point 3) and BSplayer only takes one of them (and luckily it handles Pause before Play, otherwise you'll end up with a not functional Pause button that in my opinion is worse than a non functional Play button)
If feature at pint 3 will be implemented this problem will never occur again ;)

[kulakov]

Thanks for the answer.

1. Sorry, overlooked that. But when I did so it didn't work. Perhaps it only works with regular keys?
2, 3. I don't think it is worth an option. Using a single interface element for both Play and Pause is very natural and widely used, the player might understand it intrinsically and simply not give a warning at all. The 2 functions never conflict.
Implementation - I think the only difference with the current one is that Pause cannot be performed without playback. The player already has some intelligence regarding what to do - Play or Pause when the key is pressed. As far as I could see it selects Play when it's paused and Pause otherwise. The only mistake with this approach is that it selects Pause when it's stopped while it should Play. So all they have to do is check whether the player is stopped and if so play, not pause.

[BSPeter]

Did you select "Auto play" under
(rightclick >) Options > Preferences > General > [General settings] ?

[kulakov]

This option is selected but I'm not sure it has something to do with the topic.
Except maybe that it has the word 'play' mentioned in it.

[Tizio]

(I think that) What BSPeter wanted to point out is that with "Auto play" option enabled you'll not have to assign Play/Pause to the same button, but only use Pause since the file automatically plays in first instance..

This obviously works for every file you open, but doesn't work if you stop it ;)

Yes, you are right :) , no need to distinguish between Play/Pause, the player can automatically handle this!

I hope BSP authors will implement these new features in next releases ;)

[kulakov]

I see, the autoplay feature is fine, but it's not only about starting playback, which is usually initiated with mouse and which I don't care about cause I'm anyway switched to the player. Actually, I don't often stop and play again, rather pause and play, and it's not a big problem to hit play twice, it's just a small bug. To me more imporant is that the player would react at MM keys without being focused, and it doesn't, even though I checked the global option for the keys.

[Tizio]

Yes, bug confirmed, this evening I'll add it to the bugs thread, thanks for the note ;)

[kulakov]

That's great, meanwhile, I finally found out how to make BSPlayer react at the MM keys when it is not focused. That wasn't easy at all!
When I just pressed the right keys at the right functions and checked the global option that was not enough. Trying different keys I found out that the player reacts at MM keys globally when I set another - regular - key for the function. In this case I set "C" for Play, and it did the magic. Note that the trick not only fixed the Play key - it fixed all the MM keys. As far as I can see, the player sets some global handler for keyboard only when a regular key has been set. Then, once the handler is set it works for all global keys (this is just my rough guess).
As I need my "C" in other applications (BSPlayer does not leave it to the focused application!) I decided to change it to another, seldom used key. I tried Shift-F12, but to my surprise, the magic stopped working. I tried Ctrl, Shift and Alt - none of them worked, and only simple F12 did. I don't use F12 so this is what I finally set for Play (only to make global keys work, not because I really want F12).
Note that the other keys - Next and Prev - only worked globally when I set the same key for both Windowed mode and Full screen mode. Without it they did work when the player was focused but not otherwise.
Also note that when I tried to set F12 to another function instead of Play - Stop - the global feature didn't work either. It was only with Play, so this all is very unstable and non-obvious.
I must say that when I finally made every single MM key work the way I wanted it was like I have achieved something unbelievable. This is definitely not something I expected from the player. What took me a lot of efforts should actually come right out of the box (like with for ex. WMP).
I really don't know which of the emoticons to select for the situation.

[BSPeter]

Something like this?

[Tizio]

Ok, I added the bug report in the bugs section, sorry if I wasn't able to make it yesterday as I promised, but my new job takes me more time than before.. :P
I also sent a PM to a BSP member, so this bug (and maybe also suggestions) will hopefully be fixed (added) in next beta/final release

[Ico-man]

Try upcoming version 2.34 for improved multimedia keys support.