The VideoLAN Forums

VLC is such a great product used by millions of people, but the lack of gamepad support makes it really convoluted to control videos with certain media setups. I have a custom shell replacement on my system that I can launch games and VLC from, but I control it with a gamepad, so I can't control VLC with it.

I don't care whether it's RawInput, DirectInput, XInput, or whatever. Just some kind of gamepad support would be so awesome. If any developer is willing to work with me, I've already written code to do this in Windows, but I know that VLC would want some kind of platform agnostic solution.

Thanks!

Why can't your gamepad send hotkeys?

How would a gamepad send hotkeys when VLC doesn't support any API it uses?

Well, VLC supports the standard key events. If the gamepad does not emit standard key events, then it's not going to work - by design. If it does send events but VLC does not know the mappings, then it's easy to add for somebody with the hardware.

First, I love VLC, it was the only thing that worked back in the Windows XP era.
I'm not a developer i am a transcriber. VLC has high quality playback and that is fantastic. If you did support game controllers with Directinput (or anything that does not use hotkeys) then i can:
(1) type out my transcriptions with High Quality,
(2) you can market your product as transcription software and open yourself up to a whole new market/community which is steadily growing and
(3) other end users can have a more comfortable feel as already mentioned above by dirthehad.

Please, the transcription software i use is okay but i need higher quality. I really hope you reconsider and use this as an opportunity for yourselves to help so many people.

If a controller device does not come with an interface to remap it to keyboard keys, then uncle Google says there are external solutions: https://www.howtogeek.com/404214/how-to-remap-any-controller-to-keyboard-keys-on-windows-and-macos/
VLC contains hotkeys interface to set desired keys for VLC actions, so it is the opposite thing to setting actions for controller's elements (buttons, directions) like in a setup of a game.

This would be great as well but I'm not sure how useful this could be for this but I'll link it http://gainput.johanneskuhlmann.de/. Gainput is the awesome C++ input library for your game. It's easy to use, open source and cross-platform.

I'm sure it can be used for more than just games