Title says it all, it simply won't play/pause, next/previous, anything unless it has focus. I completely uninstalled, then reinstalled it and the issue is still here. WMP and Foobar2000 do not have this problem, only VLC.
It also seems to be playing videos at a lower frame rate than anything else, what happened, VLC, what happened?
Have you ever tried Media Player Classic? :D ... never-mind, try to install a portable version of VLC, because it doesn't matter how many times you install/reinstall the reg keys still remain. Maybe clean the registry.
You should always use something like CCleaner after uninstalling software to make sure that you get as much of it as possible, so make sure that you are doing that when reinstalling it, OP. I am not sure what you mean by "focus" though, so I am at a lose as to how to go about helping you, but if no one else seems to be having this issue, and you have completely uninstalled it and reinstalled it, then it is likely something else on your machine that is having the problem.
I have never had non-portable VLC, I hate Windows having registry muckyness.
Sorry for the term "focus", it was the only thing that came to mind, it's from .NET programming, if something has "focus" it just means it's like ... the selected whatever it is. Like how when you click off a window/textbox/whatever, it nolonger has the "focus".
Example: I have two monitors, main playing a movie, other with Chrome. If I click to Chrome and try to pause the movie it won't work, because for whatever reason VLC simply won't. Though, if I keep it on VLC it works.
Edit: I seem to have fixed the playback having low framerate, I changed the video output mode from Auto to OpenGL.
Oh, that is what you mean. How are you going about attempting to pause it if it isn't in focus?
When you go to uninstall a program, use Revo Uninstaller. Works a lot better the the program uninstaller in windows. Revo scans for left overs like registry files
No idea, I remember about a year ago I had a similar problem, but this time I can't set hotkeys as global.
I grabbed the free trial of Revo Uninstaller to uninstall/reinstall again to see if it caught anything, but it didn't.