Enabling and Disabling Global Media Playback Control in Chrome: What You Need to Know

Frequently I watch or listen to various video or audio sources in web browsers (firefox, chrome, etc) and every single page that has the potential to play some audio registers itself in this same Windows 10 media control interface.

Agreed. This change was incredibly idiotic to leave enabled by default, as YouTube, Soundcloud and many other sites do not play well with this change. Spotify should take priority as it can properly interpret hardware media key controls. YouTube and Soundcloud cannot. The media keys do not work properly, at all, and I find it hard to see why anyone would expect them to without custom fixes made.

How to enable or disable Global Media Playback Control in Chrome

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Ok, I can disable media keys in Firefox, but it only stopped them from playing sound in random tab. Keys still do not work properly. Instead of managing my Spotify music playback, wthey do nothing at all. What else can I do?(yes, I have restarted Firefox after applying changes)

When this feature is enabled, you will see a play icon on the Edge extension area, clicking on it will show you a list of all the media sessions running in the browser, from there you can control your media sessions. You can play or pause just by making a single click.

You can disable the autoplay policy entirely by using a command line flag: chrome.exe --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required. This allows you to test your website as if user were strongly engaged with your site and playback autoplay would be always allowed.

In older versions of Chrome (version 77 to 84), there was a hidden preference/flag called Global Media Controls in Chrome://flags page (chrome://flags/#global-media-controls) which could be used to turn on/off the feature and users were able to disable and remove the Media Control icon from Chrome toolbar by setting this flag to Disabled.

Starting from Google Chrome 70, the picture-in-picture mode can be enabled to display an always on top floating player from YouTube.This player can be resized and moved, but has no playback controls and the original video window must remain open.To enable this mode, you can right-click inside the video player twice, then select the Picture in Picture option from the context menu.If you are using an older version of Chrome, you can have a similar mode using the picture-in-picture extension.

You can control the playback of an open video player while you navigate other pages on Google Chrome starting from the 77. You had to explicitly enable the Global Media Controls experiment flag to use it, but it can be tested in the latest versions without any tweaking.

When enabled, if the browser detects a controllable media session, it will display a small play button to the right of the address bar. At this point, it appears to only work with YouTube videos and it does not matter if its embedded or being watched directly on YouTube.com.

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