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Author Topic: Obtaining keyboard focus for video player within Internet Explorer webpage  (Read 2399 times)

Gatherum

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So this is going to sound like an unnecessarily convoluted process to accomplish a simple task that I can accomplish elsewhere in other ways. Call it an experiment, I suppose. I am running Windows 10 Pro 64-bit on two machines: one client (my laptop), and one server (my HTPC). On the server, I have MC running at startup in theatre view, exclusively on its second monitor, which is my television. I have added a category under Video called "Crunchyroll". Instead of defining it as a webpage, I have specified that selecting that category will open Internet Explorer with the following parameters:

Code: [Select]
-k https://www.crunchyroll.com/home/queue
This opens IE in fullscreen kiosk mode on the same monitor (it was the last monitor on which I had it maximised), and redirects to the Crunchyroll login page, since you can't have a queue if you're not a registered member. I have the Lastpass addon set up to automatically fill in my login information. I shift+tab to the log in button, hit enter, and it goes where I want it to. I tab to whatever series I have in my queue, hit enter, and it takes me to whatever episode is next up for streaming. Being a regular flash video player, it plays automatically. I have one problem: while Crunchyroll does make use of keyboard shortcuts for seeking, entering and exiting fullscreen, and the like, I can't get them to work because I can't figure out how to focus keyboard input to the video player. I've looked around the internet for an answer, but the only solution I'm finding is to the use the mouse to click on the player. If you didn't notice yet after reading this far, however, the point is not to use the mouse.

For additional background, I have another, regular computer monitor connected to my HTPC, set as my primary display. On the HTPC, I have RealVNC Server set up to host connections to my client, running RealVNC Viewer. The server is set up so that it only serves the primary display to the client. This is to prevent any mouse input from interrupting madVR's fullscreen exclusive mode during video playback in MC (I control that with either Gizmo on my phone, or another copy of MC on my laptop set up in client configuration), and also because remoting into a dual-monitor setup with a laptop whose display's maximum resolution is only 1366 x 768 is rather awkward. The primary monitor on my HTPC is solely for use in maintenance and configurations of the various pieces of software I have installed, and also for managing DVDFab rips and Subtitle Edit/tsMuxeR operations. Therefore, even if I wanted to use my mouse on the HTPC's second display, I really can't unless I change that RealVNC Server option back, which I really don't want to do (switching it back and forth is also not intuitive, the way RealVNC tucked the option away into the expert settings). Unfortunately, RealVNC Server does not have the ability to serve different monitors to different connecting devices. If it did, I'd set it up so that it serves the HTPC's primary display to my laptop client, and its second display to VNC Viewer on my phone while IE is running. I can control IE via alt+tab and than tab/shift+tab. But, again...embedded video players cause problems.

For the record, yes, I am aware that Crunchyroll is available to subscribers as an app for basically every major device known to man. At various times, I have been able to run it on my PS3, Wii U, Xbox One, and the like. The idea is to consolidate all media playback to my HTPC. Again, it's really more of an experiment. I'm SO close. I just need keyboard input to work for video players in a browser without the mouse. That's it. Really wish it had something similar to:

Code: [Select]
www.youtube.com/tv#
...because then, I could just navigate it within MC via Gizmo, but it just doesn't exist. Same idea with Hulu.

Any feedback, even to tell me that it's impossible, would be appreciated.
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