This is a long shot in this forum but I've been trying to work this out for weeks. A couple of weeks ago I tried the VLC forum and no help other than "It ain't us, it's linux HID".

The basic problem is:

I'm trying to install VLC (or any video viewer, really) to enable my wife to carry out video transcription on linux (specifically, Ubuntu).

All works as expected except I cannot get a USB foot pedal to work with VLC (required to Play/Pause, Rewind and Forward). An installation of Express Scribe (only runs audio) allows me to go through a simple setup where it asks for a pedal press, I press a pedal and it all works. Given the complexity of VLC I expected a similar feature but it's not there.

For Windows I could buy a piece of software that would do the trick but nothing for linux (and I would not expect it to be necessary anyway - a script or two should suffice at most).

The VLC forum suggests that, because it's HID (Human Interface Device) I need to work out how to run that into VLC. In my view, laziness on the part of VLC - how difficult can it be to do this at the interface level?

I've played with lirc and a couple of other HID-type interfaces but can't work out how to do it. This may simply be lack of knowledge/experience on my part.

Running cat on hiddev0 comes up with a 24-byte string for each pedal action - no idea why so many bytes nor how to make use of them. "Put the pedal code into the VLC short-cuts" was one piece of advice but I can see no way of altering the "hot-keys" except by pressing a combination of keys on an ordinary keyboard. There seems to be no facility on VLC to enter arbitrary key-code strings.

I've searched online in a number of different ways for a solution and the appearance is that no one wants to do this - which I can't quite believe. Although even Express Scribe no longer update their software for linux - plenty of old versions offered on download sites but not the latest version.

If anyone has any ideas they would be gratefully received.