Ubuntu – How to make the keyboard media keys to work with VLC globally

multimediaunityvlc

My keyboard has media keys and they work globally on Unity with Banshee but don't with VLC when another app is focused.

How would I fix that?

Best Answer

I had a similar problem and the issue was that Gnome would capture the media keys before they reached VLC, to fix this you can go to "System->Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts"

There you will see a header called sound (Expand it if needed), and remove the key combinations you want in VLC from there (You can disable them by clicking on the item and then pressing backspace).

Only problem with this is that any other applications that do use Gnome's built-in handling won't work anymore with the media keys, unless you add them again (Which in turn breaks VLC again)

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to change the VLC icon on the launcher

If it isn't an issue with the theme you're using, then have you tried updating the icon cache with sudo gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/hicolor ? (replace "hicolor" by whichever theme you're using. You'll need to put the icon in the appropriate theme folder as well)

As a bit of extra information. In /usr/share/applications you'll find a vlc.desktop file. You could change the following line:

Icon=vlc

With another Icon of your choice (I prefere to set a svg file in the "scalable" directory rather than a rasterized x by y png ). After that you have to do the update command I gave earlier.

If you encounter any issues with the update command try appending the -f -t options.

Ubuntu – How to revert VLC media player to its original state

You can reset your VLC media player settings by renaming your current VLC media player configuration folder.
Execute the following command in a terminal:

mv ~/.config/vlc ~/.config/vlc.old

If VLC media player still does not open correctly you can try reinstalling VLC media player:

sudo apt-get remove --purge vlc
sudo apt-get install vlc

Before running VLC media player , make sure it is not still running:

ps ax | grep vlc

This should not return anything. If it does execute the commands below until the ps command keeps quiet (does not return anything any more). Start with the first, and then use the next until it gets killed successfully:

pkill vlc
killall vlc
killall -9 vlc

Notes:

You can probably delete your old configuration folder with rm -rf ~/.config/vlc.old.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to change the VLC icon on the launcher

Ubuntu – How to revert VLC media player to its original state

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