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cleggy
Contributor
Contributor

Workstation Player 14: Passing keystrokes directly to host

I have a multimedia keyboard that has playback controls, and a volume knob. During the day I have music playing in the host that I often want to pause & resume when working in a VM. I also occasionally need to adjust the volume. Currently I have to preface any interaction with these controls with a Ctrl+Alt key sequence to pass them through to the host.

Is there a way to configure the VM so that they will always be handled by the host?

3 Replies
wila
Immortal
Immortal

Hi,

AFAICR there is no such option in Workstation.

What you could do however is to connect to the guest OS in a different way.

For example use any available in-guest remote features, such as remote desktop on a windows client, or VNC if you are using a Linux guest.

If you had been using Workstation Pro instead of Workstation Player then you could also have used the VNC server option that comes with Workstation. Sadly that is not available for Player.

Hope this helps,

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
cleggy
Contributor
Contributor

That's a shame. No way I'm going to RDP into a VM just to achieve this. So I guess I'm stuck escaping these controls with Ctrl+Alt for now.

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bluefirestorm
Champion
Champion

The documentation indicates you can change the keyboard mapping but not about unmapping.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workstation-Player-for-Windows/14.0/com.vmware.player.win.using.do...

So you have a few things could try to do:

Find out what the volume knob volume up and volume down keycodes/vscan codes are and try mapping it to some benign action such as up arrow or down arrow (just to somehow confirm you got the mapping right).

Don't know if unmapping will work if you map it to blank.

Alternatively, you could just switch to playing music on the VM that you spend most of your time on instead of on the host.

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