Global hotkeys (especially the media ones) have the advantage of you just having to send the keypress to "active window" (ie, no particular target), so this means that even if the media player is minimized in the notification area, it can still accept them.
I know that Foobar works in this fashion, so I would assume that VLC would as well. On top of that, media hotkeys are generic enough that even across different languages, the Scancode (and virtual keycode as well) are the same.
(there are some differences to SC and VK depending on language)