The VideoLAN Forums

Backstory: I have a Kensington Expert Mouse, which I love: trackball w/ scroll wheel and 4 buttons that allow chording. On my old system ('07 C2D Macbook Pro), I drove it flawlessly using Kensington's old, unsupported Mouseworks, which allowed application specific settings, so I happily set the buttons I ordinarily used for Copy/Paste to activate the Backwards/Forwards hotkeys while under VLC. On my new system (i7 Macbook Pro), Mouseworks doesn't work. The replacement software from Kensington--Trackballworks--maddeningly does *not* allow application specific settings. And I have not found another driver that will recognize chords on my Expert Mouse.

Problem: VLC will not let me assign ⌘C or ⌘V as the hotkeys for jumping backwards/forwards. It says, "Invalid combination. Regrettably, these keys cannot be assigned as hotkey shortcuts." So evidently these are reserved for copy/paste use only. Sidenote: I don't believe I have ever copied or pasted anything in VLC.

Question: Is there any way to force VLC to unassign ⌘C and ⌘V from the Edit menu and allow me to remap them as hotkeys for backward/forward? Or can anyone suggest a better alternative?

I'm using VLC 1.1.3, 64-bit.

The only way would be editing the xib file (describing the edit menu in a way the Mac understands) and editing the config file in ~/Library/Preferences/VLC to set another shortcut. So, this isn't exactly trivial for an end-user.

Copy and paste isn't necessary for file or optical media playback, but it is great for the playback of network streams with long URLs, so we protected these and a few other keys (like cmd-o or cmd-q) from being overwritten.