I do not know whether this is relevant to Windows 8 or above. This was discovered and tested on Windows 7. If you uninstall the program this pop-up does not appear. I believe this means the program is installed. A light blue bar may appear at the bottom right of your desktop showing the change in volume, near the notification area. Simply use your keyboard volume control while on the Windows desktop. If you have a volume control keyboard feature you may be able to test whether you have this installed. When it is installed it seems to meddle with media key input, preventing VLC from detecting button presses when it is not focused. This is some sort of bonus program that Windows Update may install if you have a Microsoft branded mouse or keyboard (possibly on your behalf) that as far as I can tell offers little meaningful functionality over standard Windows mouse options, especially if your mouse / keyboard is a basic one. This can be found in your Windows Control Panel's normal uninstall page. The keyboard shortcut you pressed then replaces the default on the hot key column list. Then, locate the Playback Speed option and enter the new default speed you want.
Step 03 Now, click on Input/Codecs in the left tab. Then, click on All to access the Advanced Preferences dialogue box. Step 02 On the pop-up bar, hit the Inputs/Codecs tab. Uninstall 'Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center'. Press the new keyboard key, or keys, to switch the hot key to. Step 01 Launch VLC on your PC and navigate to Tools > Preferences. There is another solution if your media keys refuse to work without VLC being the focused application:
The information is useful for someone setting up VLC media key functionality for the first time but a bit of browsing around suggests that this problem persists for some people even after setting their hot key preferences.
This page seems to be the top result for this problem when Googling "vlc media keys not working", however the top (and only) answer doesn't actually address the problem.