This is very simple documentation to gnome-settings-daemon's D-Bus API for media players. gnome-settings-daemon will send key press events from multimedia keys to applications that register their interest in those events. This allows the play/pause button to control an audio player that's not focused for example. The D-Bus API is described in gsd-media-keys-manager.c (look for introspection_xml), but a small explanation follows here. 1. Create yourself a proxy object for the remote interface: Object path: /org/gnome/SettingsDaemon/MediaKeys D-Bus name: org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.MediaKeys Interface name: org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.MediaKeys 2. Register your application with gnome-settings-daemon GrabMediaPlayerKeys ("my-application", 0) with the second argument being the current time (usually 0, or the time passed to you from an event, such as a mouse click) 3. Listen to the MediaPlayerKeyPressed() signal 4. When receiving a MediaPlayerKeyPressed() signal, check whether the first argument (application) matches the value you passed to GrabMediaPlayerKeys() and apply the action depending on the key (2nd argument) Possible values of key are: - Play - Pause - Stop - Previous - Next - Rewind - FastForward - Repeat - Shuffle 5. Every time your application is focused, you should call GrabMediaPlayerKeys() again, so that gnome-settings-daemon knows which one was last used. This allows switching between a movie player and a music player, for example, and have the buttons control the last used application. 6. When your application wants to stop using the functionality it can call ReleaseMediaPlayerKeys(). If your application does not call ReleaseMediaPlayerKeys() and releases its D-Bus connection then the application will be automatically removed from the list of applications held by gnome-settings-daemon.