pdfpc prevents xbindkeys from working?

[dandrake]

I'm trying to use xbindkeys to drive pdfpc. The idea is to listen for one keypress and to simulate another with xdotool. (It's a long story; pdfpc ignores the keys from my presentation remote) I can get this to work if I do sleep 10 && xdotool key Next, in a terminal, then start pdfpc and wait 10 seconds. The slides advance as expected -- so xdotool will talk to pdfpc.

Also, in other programs, xbindkeys listens for my presentation remote and works as expected. But in pdfpc, xbindkeys simply never gets the keypress; I can verify this by changing the command it runs to something like date >> /tmp/test.txt -- nothing gets put in the file when I hit the key while pdfpc is running.

It seems like pdfpc is doing something strange with the keyboard. Any ideas what's going on?