Media Buttons

[DumbDude1994]

Ok my laptop has 8 buttons along the top border of the keyboard, as do most. They controll my media player and are working fine. My problem is that I am working on a personal project and need to know how they work. I have looked for a good 5 hours on solving this problem with no luck. All that I need to do is replicate it if someone can show me how to.
(I'm new if I'm breaking any rules tell me.)

 

[Brink]

Hello Dude, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Not sure if this is what you are wanting, but click on the link below and click on the User's Guide tab to load your laptop's manual. Go to page 106 and 97 of the manual for more details on the keyboard and it's keys.

Model Content Page

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[IggyAZ]

Hello Dude, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Not sure if this is what you are wanting, but click on the link below and click on the User's Guide tab to load your laptop's manual. Go to page 106 and 97 of the manual for more details on the keyboard and it's keys.

Model Content Page

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Shawn where do you come up with all these links?
Do you have a card file or something?
Anyway, great job as always.

 

[Brink]

Hello Iggy,

LOL, I'm close friends with Google.

 

[DumbDude1994]

Thanks for the file Brink. I may be able to use it later. But it doesn't help me with this project. Yes that is the subject that I am looking for. But it is does not explain how it works (what commands it sends to the programs). What I need is a complicated explanation of how it works and how I can replicate it.

 

[Mellon Head]

If it's a normal Windows "Media" keyboard, those buttons usually send a keyboard shortcut or macro. They're more or less standard between media player type programs, and most of them are in a tutorial found right here in the forums.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/4052-shortcut-keys-windows-7-a.html

Go down to the Media Player shortcut section. That's basically what those pretty keys do, in the form of sending a hexadecimal code or string to the OS, which is passed on to whatever media player you're using for the appropriate action.

Hope that was a little more of what you were looking for.

 

[DumbDude1994]

Not what I needed. I need something that I can send to the software that would work no matter if I had the window in focus or not, much like what the keyboard buttons do.

 

[Mellon Head]

That information from those specialty keys is usually passed in one of two ways that I can think of.

1. As an escaped (prefixed to tell the OS that it's a key control, rather than a standard short-cut key) byte or sequence of bytes.

2. The media key is specifically mapped to a function by the keyboard driver in Windows.

In both cases, the focused window knows, or is told to ignore the command by the code sequence sent to the OS, and the message is passed on to the media application. Winamp works this way if you enable the "media key" functions to allow your media keyboard to work with it. If you use standard key shortcuts, though, the Winamp window must be in focus.

Someone more versed in programming might have more info, and you could also try doing a search for the info on MSDN. There's lots of good info there.

 

[DumbDude1994]

Thanks. I searched around for a while but I couldn't find what I was looking for exactly, but I'm getting close.