Bluetooth headset play/pause key not fully effective in various media players

[Ben Harris]

UPDATE:
Function GnomeGrabber::Impl::ActivateDBusAction dont emit dbus signal "AcceleratorActivated" if be pressed key with keycodes 208 or 215 (its XF86AudioPlay).

Can be reproduce:
run in one terminal 'dbus-monitor "path=/org/gnome/Shell"'
and in other run 'xdotool key NUMBER'
where NUMBER - keycodes. Can be check 172, 172, 209, bugged 208 and 215 and other.

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I have a Sony SRS-BTM8 Bluetooth speaker, and its audio side works fairly well with Ubuntu. It also has a play/pause button and that doesn't work so well. I think the problem lies in unity-settings-daemon.

To demonstrate that the Bluetooth side is working, if I switch to a text console and run "evtest /dev/input/event9", then when pressing the button I get events for KEY_PLAYCD if the speaker is not playing anything, and alternating KEY_PAUSECD and KEY_PLAYCD if it is playing something.

However, within the Unity desktop I find that if I'm running Banshee or Rhythmbox then pressing the button successfully pauses the music, but doesn't start it playing again. If I run "xev" and give it the keyboard focus while testing this (so xev sees all ungrabbed keystrokes) then it sees only a KeyRelease event for XF86AudioPause, but both KeyPress and KeyRelease events for XF86AudioPlay. I've attached the full output from xev.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: unity-settings-daemon 14.04.0+14.04.20140606-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.16.0-25.33~14.04.2-generic 3.16.7
Uname: Linux 3.16.0-25-generic i686
ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.5
Architecture: i386
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Thu Nov 27 23:43:01 2014
DistributionChannelDescriptor:
 # This is a distribution channel descriptor
 # For more information see http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DistributionChannelDescriptor
 canonical-oem-motts-20100121-3
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2010-06-09 (1632 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu GNU/Linux 9.10 "Karmic" - Build i386 LIVE Binary 20100121-21:52
SourcePackage: unity-settings-daemon
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to trusty on 2014-08-15 (104 days ago)

[Ben Harris (bjh21.me.uk)]

A quick additional not: using "xdotool key XF86AudioPlay" and "xdotool key XF86AudioPause" works correctly, so maybe it's not all media keys that are broken and there's something odd about my Bluetooth one.

[Ben Harris (bjh21.me.uk)]

I've made a small program out of parts of bluetoothd that demonstrates this problem without the need for any special hardware. Simply compile it and run it (as root) and it will create a virtual keyboard that generates "play" and "pause" keypresses at 5.1-second intervals. If you have Rhythmbox or Banshee playing when you start the test program, the first "pause" will pause the media player, but the subsequent "play" will not re-start it.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[jesus gumaro rendon suzuki (gumaro-rendon)]

Tested the program with 14.04 up to date and it is confirmed. Can't resume music with my bluetooth headset.

[jesus gumaro rendon suzuki (gumaro-rendon)]

I'm using gnome desktop, though. I don't know if that makes a difference.

[Jean-Pol Landrain (jplandrain)]

I can confirm the problem with Ubuntu 14.10 and a Plantronics Backbeat Pro bluetooth headset.

[Yura (ykuchinskiy)]

I think I have the same problem with Sony SBH20, Ubuntu 15.04, kernel 4.0.4

Device is paired and bluetooth buttons detectable in "System Setings" -> "Keyboard" -> "Shortcuts" -> "Sound and Media"

* Previous Track detected as "Audio previous" and working as expected in all apps
* Next track detectable as "Audio next" and working as expected in all apps

* Play (or play/pause) detectable as "Audio play", but does not stop resume playback in all apps

Working apps:
1. Totem Movie Player
2. Spotify, but only if you click twice

Not working apps:
1. Pithos (pandora app for linux)
2. Chrome or FireFox (this is maybe app specific problem)
3. Rhythmbox

I would like to add that all apps (except chrome and firefox) are working with the keyboard pause/resume media key.
Question: who knows the flow of key events, please suggest how to debug this problem?

Here is output from "xev" for bluetooth pause/resume key

KeyPress event, serial 47, synthetic NO, window 0x5000001,
    root 0xaf, subw 0x0, time 73921661, (212,2196), root:(1500,2856),
    state 0x0, keycode 209 (keysym 0x1008ff31, XF86AudioPause), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 48, synthetic NO, window 0x5000001,
    root 0xaf, subw 0x0, time 73921858, (212,2196), root:(1500,2856),
    state 0x0, keycode 209 (keysym 0x1008ff31, XF86AudioPause), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 48, synthetic NO, window 0x5000001,
    root 0xaf, subw 0x0, time 73928594, (212,2196), root:(1500,2856),
    state 0x0, keycode 208 (keysym 0x1008ff14, XF86AudioPlay), same_screen YES,
    XKeysymToKeycode returns keycode: 172
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 48, synthetic NO, window 0x5000001,
    root 0xaf, subw 0x0, time 73928618, (212,2196), root:(1500,2856),
    state 0x0, keycode 208 (keysym 0x1008ff14, XF86AudioPlay), same_screen YES,
    XKeysymToKeycode returns keycode: 172
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 48, synthetic NO, window 0x5000001,
    root 0xaf, subw 0x0, time 73965210, (212,2196), root:(1500,2856),
    state 0x0, keycode 209 (keysym 0x1008ff31, XF86AudioPause), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 48, synthetic NO, window 0x5000001,
    root 0xaf, subw 0x0, time 73965728, (212,2196), root:(1500,2856),
    state 0x0, keycode 209 (keysym 0x1008ff31, XF86AudioPause), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 48, synthetic NO, window 0x5000001,
    root 0xaf, subw 0x0, time 73971740, (212,2196), root:(1500,2856),
    state 0x0, keycode 208 (keysym 0x1008ff14, XF86AudioPlay), same_screen YES,
    XKeysymToKeycode returns keycode: 172
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 48, synthetic NO, window 0x5000001,
    ro...

[Yura (ykuchinskiy)]

VLC is working too, but you have to triple click quickly or double click slowly on bluetooth play/pause key...

[Lalo Martins (lalo.martins)]

+1 here, mine is a Philips SHB7150, and the problem was already present at least in 14.10, maybe earlier.

Reason I'm commenting though: playing around with xev, it seems to take some black magic to predict whether I'll get XF86AudioPlay or XF86AudioPause.

- If no app is playing, it's always XF86AudioPlay, regardless what combination of apps is running.
- If rhythmbox is playing, it's XF86AudioPause.
- If gmusicbrowser, mpv, or vlc is playing, it alternates between the two (but neither app responds to it regardless of state and event).
- And mplayer probably doesn't register itself with whatever it is, since it always gets XF86AudioPlay.

I also found that if vlc or mpv is focused, it does play when it's paused and I press the button; when it's playing, it will only pause every other press (thinking of the xev experiment above, I guess when the generated keysym is XF86AudioPause). The same is not true of gmusicbrowser. As for mplayer, if it's focused it responds exactly right.

[nebuchar (nebuchar)]

I have the same problem with a Plantronics Backbeat pro and 14.04 up to date.

[levineds (levineds)]

This bug persists in 16.04.

[Miroslav Slavik (stream-mis)]

Hi, is there any way to work around this issue? I confirm that the bug is persistent in 16.04.

[Franchesko Salias Hudro Pedros (fshp)]

You can replace this setting-daemon by mate-system-daemon. But this solution can reproduce other bugs :-)

[Artyom (vagran)]

> Hi, is there any way to work around this issue? I confirm that the bug is persistent in 16.04.

Global application shortcuts still work correctly with bluetooth media buttons. So for me I worked around this problem particularly with rhythmbox by adding global application shortcut to command "rhythmbox-client --play-pause".

[levineds (levineds)]

>Global application shortcuts still work correctly with bluetooth media buttons. So for me I worked >around this problem particularly with rhythmbox by adding global application shortcut to command >"rhythmbox-client --play-pause".

This is a good suggestion. A general workaround for all programs (at least in 16.04) is to, in the "Keyboards" utility, under the "Shortcuts" tab, in the "Sound and Media" section, change "Play (or play/pause)" to the the Bluetooth event. On mine, this changed it from "Audio play" to "Audio pause". Now, in Spotify, my bluetooth headphones can both pause and play the music (although I have to hit it twice for each).

[Robin Sheat (eythian)]

For my case, with Bose QC35 bluetooth headphones, skip forward and backward worked with no configuration, but play/pause didn't at all.

The workaround I found was to use xbindkeys with the help of xbindkeys-config to set the following:

"xdotool key XF86AudioPlay"
    c:208

in my ~/.xbindkeysrc. This is strange, as pretty much everything else sees the button as XF86AudioPlay, but it wasn't being seen as a media key by the player. But it works now.

[Franchesko Salias Hudro Pedros (fshp)]

Because have 2 ways for listing keys:

1) native (as VLC). Application get keycodes self. It always work fine.
2) over dbus observer from gnome/unity/etc-settings-daemon.

unity/gnome-settings-daemon have been rewritten. Now they listen only first XF86AudioPlay key. Bluetooth key not work if keyboard (or other early connected device) have this key.

mate-settings-daemon have legacy code from gnome2, but work fine too.