Transcription using USB VEC Infinity foot pedal

[dstiles]

I'm running VLC 1.1.13 on Ubuntu Lucid (this can be updated if it will solve the problem).

If I run Express Scribe it immediately picks up the USB foot pedal and it takes ten seconds to tell Scribe which pedal is which (play, rewind, forward).

I have spent a LONG time spread over the past couple of weeks trying to get VLC to do the same. Nothing works - I even tried lirc and RC.

I found one post which tried to address the issue by running lirc with a script but it was complex and I could not make it work.

Surely VLC, one of the most advanced video and audio players around, can easily run a USB foot pedal? What am I missing, please?

All help gratefully received.
Dave

[dstiles]

Am I to assume VLC cannot manage a simple USB foot pedal?

This seems a very low-tech issue to have escaped from such versatile software. Surely there must be a simple solution?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

VLC does not care or even know about USB. That's something for the operating system and device drivers.

If the device is exposed as normal HID, it will work out of the box as any other input. You might need to configure the short cuts in the preferences.

[dstiles]

Thanks for the reply.

I have spent some time trying to work out how to do this but cannot make it work. Can you point me at a suitable procedure, please? Possibly also to a tool that can read the incoming codes from a HID device?

Thanks
Dave

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

HID devices are handled by the kernel and Xorg. There is no "tool" to be had, if it's a proper HID device anyway.

[dstiles]

Thanks for your help.

I know what you mean but I'll have to delve into linux rather more to fully understand.

I was hoping it would work as simply as Express Scribe, which I only had to install and which then had a panel that allowed me to set up the pedal codes. Ah, well.

I'll plug away at HID and see what comes up.

Thanks
Dave

[thresh]

use xev to find keycodes which come from your pedal

[dstiles]

Thanks. Looking into xev now. Well, I would be but my wife has snatched back the footpedal to do some work.

Dave

[dstiles]

Thanks for the xev idea but it failed to respond to any actions of the footpedal.

Following up on an idea from elsewhere I used cat /dev/usb/hiddev0 and saved the result to a file. Difficult to decipher what the result should be with 24 bytes per action. I did try to enter a code into the Hotkeys but I was only allowed to press a keyboard key, so no use trying that anyway.

I have to say this is very discouraging. I am not entilrey non-technical - I used to be a C programmer - but trying to get a simple footpedal to work on VLC is not easy. Why can it not have an easy-to-use setup like Express Scribe? That works "out of the box".

There are a lot of different interface options: surely one could be added for HID devices such as a footpedal? It needs something easy to use since footpedal output codes vary and some people prefer swapped left/right forward/rewind anyway, for example.

Surely someone has got a footpedal working with VLC? Or is it impossible?

Dave

[nasfarley88]

I've pounded the internet for an answer to this for a long time too (eager to transcribe only on linux, as express scribe doesn't work on my linux ), it's really not that simple to integrate it. If you do find an answer please post it! I'm looking into coding a solution myself, so maybe in a couple of weeks they'll be something .

[AnneAnneAnne]

Hello, my name is Anne and I have the same problem. I could only find a possible solution for windows: VLC Media Player Foot Pedal Utility 2009.09 but nothing for mac. Morover, Scribe keeps crashing all the time as soon as I load more than five filey, VLC does the job without problems but no foot pedal. If anybody knows something that works, please let me know!

Thanks a lot Anne

[dstiles]

I still have not found a solution to this. I see no reason why VLC could not provide a solution, though. All it should take is someone who has a bit more knowledge about how linux works than I do.

As far as I can work out, the problem is reading the pedal via a HID and converting the result to a key value AND THEN allowing arbitrary key values to be entered - or perhaps the converter could present the "keys" to VLC's shortcut panel? I tried doing this via lirc but haven't enough knowledge of linux to make it work - a long time since I was a proper programmer!

I like VLC in general terms and use it for replaying movies and DVDs. I would like to use it for transcription as well but at the moment VLC themselves seem uninterested in providing the means.

[nasfarley88]

I am currently working on a solution at https://github.com/nasfarley88/pedal2bash. It's still very much in the testing stage, and doesn't work 'out of the box' but it's progress. Maybe it'll be fully complete by Christmas, as I have uni work too! All that said, I'd be very happy for someone to take a look/configure the bash scripts. At the moment, all it does is convert pedal presses to bash scripts, but it's a start.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Handling input devices is part of the operating system Hardware Abstraction Layer. Then the windowing system has to take care of focus and input event dispatch, essentially arbitrate access to the input devices between multiple applications. It would not make technical sense for VLC and every other application to deal directly with input devices.

Also, unless it runs as root, VLC cannot access the input devices nor USB devices directly.

[dstiles]

How is it that Express Scribe can do this? It requires only that I plug in the foot pedal and then run ES - that's it!

Surely VLC can manage that?

[dstiles]

Sorry, I meant to add:

nasfarley88 - if you get past the bash script stage I'd be interested in checking it out!

Keep us posted!

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

I cannot comment on the specifics of a device that I don't have.

[dstiles]

Over 1500 responses to this thread and still no action from VLC. I would suggest the number indicates a lot of interest in this topic.

I spent some time working on the project. I managed to get pedal-pushes from the USB pedal and then ran out of time, but from that excercise it is obvious that anyone could add a foot-pedal to VLC if they have an insight into VLC and a knowledge of C (of which mine is a long time in the past).

I've just installed Express Scribe on a third linux machine (specifically Mint) and the foot pedal works with no problem, straight out of the box. Sadly Scribe is an audio-only tool.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

There are not that many VLC developers, and none of them have a foot pedal. Since nobody cared to even provide the requested X11 events, I gather it's not all that badly missing.

[dstiles]

A few dollars to vastly improve a product? Hmm. Approx $50 new, far less second-hand.

You seem to be making the assumption that VLC users are technical people who know what X11 events are (amongst other things). This is not so: I suspect most users of VLC are exactly that: users.

Not knowing what X11 events are I cannot help. I obtained a few USB button press values and worked out the connection between codes and pedals but there is no way of entering those into VLC as short-cut keys. A programmer with VLC, linux and C experience should be able to nail the problem within a day. Sadly I lack most of the experience required, especially VLC interface and linux protocol.

How about contacting NCH (Express Scribe) and asking how they did it? They don't do video so they should be helpful.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

You seem to be making the assumption that VLC developers have a lot of free time, money and motivation to throw at solving other people's problems.

Do you realize that you just asked for engineers to work, not even for free, but to actually spend money to work for you? Would you pay to work?

[dstiles]

Actually I was working on the principle that VLC is a popular application that people want to use in a particular mode - 1500+ people, according to the interest shown in this thread.

And yes, I frequently work for nothing for my customers, but in this case I would have expected the developer to be paid at least a small remuneration to cover expenses. It sells the product - if there were a fee for the extra interface I'm sure peole who really needed the feature would pay for it: how many buy the Windows pedal add-on?

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

No idea. And what foot pedal? They are so many different ones... ANd it is quite easy to activate the http requests and binds the keys of the pedal to this.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

There is one big flaw in your analogy: You are not a VLC customer, you are a VLC user. You did not buy VLC, and hence you have no moral or legal rights to anything like a customer service. As you can imagine, there is no money to fund the would-be customer service. You are a (free) user.

Also, I see only 3 interested people in this thread, not 1500. And apparently none of them is willing to figure out how to run xev and provide the informations nicely requested by the volunteer developers.

[dstiles]

Jean-Baptiste Kempf
ANY USB footpedal - they work the same with perhaps different codes; but take the thread's subject line - VEC Infinity USB foot pedals, which are porobably the most common.

It may be "easy to activate the http requests and binds the keys of the pedal" but how many people know how to do that? If it is easy to do, any chance of a bit of documentation, please?

Rémi Denis-Courmont
"Also, I see only 3 interested people in this thread, not 1500" - over 1500 people have READ this thread, which suggests quite a bit of interest in finding out how to implement a foot pedal. Before my original post here I found several postings on linux sites asking the same basic question.

"...none of them is willing to figure out how to run xev..." - xev does not return values for this because it is not a keyboard. It requires a few lines of C to implement the foot pedal via hiddev - I've managed to trap the codes but not to get them into VLC.