next »

[Guest]

XMPlay has the ability to use those 'special' multimedia keys found on many keyboards, to play/pause, adjust volume, change tracks, etc.  To define your hotkeys, you simply press the key for the function you want.  It works terrifically well with my Logitech Internet Access keyboard.

Well, I'd like to use my 'sleep' key to simply put the monitor to sleep, not to hybernate Windows (XP), or whatever that key does by default.  I've got a tiny utility that sleeps the monitor.  But, I can't find a hotkey-manager-type utility that recognizes those 'special' keys, like the 'sleep' key.  XMPlay can easily see them, so obviously it's not too hard to do.  Does anyone know how to do this?

ADVthanksANCE

[Torkell]

Have a look at power options in control panel. You may find that it's possible to change what the sleep key does in there (certainly you can change what happens when the power switch is pressed, or when the lid on a laptop is closed).

[Guest]

Boggy, that was a good suggestion, and I checked it right away.  There's lots of settings in there (many having to do with having a UPS), and there certainly is a setting for the power button, but unfortunately nothing for the sleep button.

I realize this is rather off topic for XMPlay, but XMPlay does handle these special keys very well, in addition to doing its main job very well .  Guess I just hoped someone here might know of a good hotkey utility that would handle these special keys.  So far I've found a whole lot of hotkey utilities.  Some of them seem to be very good, but don't handle special keys.  A couple I tried do actually handle the special keys, but are rather buggy in other respects.  Oh well, the search goes on.....

[Guest]

After my last post above, I was googling for a hotkey utility again, and I came across a thread in the Hydrogenaudio foobar2000 [a competitor ] forum, where something similar was being asked.  A guy called Guillaume recommended two utilities:  AutoHotkey and HoeKey, both of which are free.

AutoHotkey is extensive, including many additional capabilities, such as macros and much more.  HoeKey is a tiny (12kB) hotkey manager.  I read quite a bit about each, and both appear to handle special keys with aplomb.  I downloaded them both, and so far have installed AutoHotkey, which does what I was looking for beautifully.  I'll have to play more with them both when time permits, but just wanted to get this posted for anyone else who may be looking for something similar.

Also, I should explain that on my system running XP (SP2), XMPlay handled the media keys perfectly, and the Sleep button caused XP to go into standby mode.  That was without having yet gotten around to installing the Logitech iTouch keyboard software, which I then did specifically to use the Sleep key.  Well, wouldn't you know, that software provides for defining all the internet keys, but with regards to the Sleep key, it says that key cannot be redefined under XP.  [Well, obviously it can, because XMPlay can use it for media functions if you want it to; I tried it!  But I guess Logitech hasn't figured out how, yet. ]  But the thing is, that since installing iTouch, the Sleep key now does nothing!  So iTouch has at least released the key from Windows' clutches, and I can now happily use one of the two utilities mentioned above for this job and much more.