Key events in Android services

I've made some research concluded that afaik I can't have an Android service for key events capture. But - maybe some will have any workaround. I have a player application, which i want to play/pause using a special button on my earphones (included for my samsung galaxy S). This is button for reciving and ending phone calls set on phones cable. Ive tested this button - it equals KeyCode.KEYCODE_BUTTON_B const (79). And it can be handled when my player is on screen, but I'd like to play/pause also when my phone is lock开发者_运维百科ed (with screen off). Do You think this is possible? For call reciving I think android uses a trick: when someone calling, the screen goes active, and the call-reciving activity can handle key events (I think - this is how it's work, but I can be wrong). I have no idea - how to play/pause my app using this button.

---

I don't think there is any real good way to achieve what you want to do from the application level. However one possible solution I can come up with is this:

Listen for screen off and on Intents. When you receive SCREEN_OFF start up a "blank" activity that does nothing but listen for your button press and passes it along to your music service. When you recieve SCREEN_ON finish() this blank activity.

I don't know for sure that this approach will work, but I used something similar to be able to listen for volume button presses while the screen was off.

Note about listening for SCREEN_OFF and SCREEN_ON intents. When I did this I had to set the filter for my receiver in java code rather than in the manifest. For some reason when I set the intent filter from the manifest it wasn't receiving those intents properly.