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Does anyone know if it is possible to either make RDP ignore media keys (ie let the local system process them rather than the remote system), or capture them before RDP processes them, and send them directly to the local system?

Basically I have a setup in which I have a media player playing music on my local system, and when I RDP into various systems I want to still be able to control the media player with the media keys, rather than the remote system interpreting them.

I found one solution that utilises a small app on the remote machine that captures the media keys (well, configurable for any keystroke) and sends them back to an agent on the local system. It seems a rather convoluted way and since I RDP into VMs or KVM switches I.E. not always a Windows RDP host directly I can't run the client-side app on them.

Any suggestions would be welcomed.

TIA

Brad Mace
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Tim Jones
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2 Answers2

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I've written an AutoHotkey script which captures the media keys locally, so they don't get sent to the remote system:
https://github.com/neon-dev/RDPHotkeyHelper

Neon
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AFAIK this isn't possible. The Windows RDP clients do not allow this level of granularity for keyboard input.

peelman
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  • Is it possible for some other to intercept the keys before RDP receives them, for instance foobar2000 constantly 'watching' the media key states via an API hook? – Tim Jones Mar 03 '11 at 20:15
  • I guess that would depend on where they're intercepting the calls. It would probably be possible, but I'm not aware of anything that does it that I could point to as an example. I work on the CoRD project and we get the gripe/request all the time that people don't want to send , they want it used locally; its just not feasible to implement. You can either send all keystrokes remotely, or none. Picking and choosing gets to be far too complicated too quickly. – peelman Mar 03 '11 at 20:40
  • Ah cool, I've used CoRD before. Great app. Looks like I might have to look into doing something myself with a hook DLL to intercept the keystrokes as they come in. – Tim Jones Mar 03 '11 at 20:57
  • Best of luck with that :) – peelman Mar 03 '11 at 21:22
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    @TimJones, Have the same issue for controlling 'local spotify' while working on remote connection. Did you find something since '11 ? – Xavier Nov 07 '16 at 14:18