Play/Pause and stop media keys not working

Hi Martijn, I am Paulo and I'd like to help.

If you have a browser open, maybe it is hijacking the media keys that's why it doesn't work on Spotify and VLC. Try to close them and see if it works.

If not, try to set it to disable on your browsers and see if it would make a difference.

Enter this if you have Chrome:
chrome://flags/#hardware-media-key-handling

If you have Edge:
edge://flags/#hardware-media-key-handling

If still not working, try the following

Close all apps before performing the below steps.

• Press the Windows key + R, type Services.msc and hit Enter.
• Then, locate for Human Interface Device Service from the list and look for the status of this service whether the service is started or stopped.
• If the service is stopped, then click on the Human Interface Device Service and click on Start.
• If the service is already started, then click on Restart to restart the service.
• Relaunch the Spotify/VLC and see if the media key would work

may God bless your soul, it actually worked <3

Just read through all the pages, none of the suggestions helped. I don't run teams, I have toggled flags, holding the win key and pressing the button doesn't help. Oddly though the mute button does work.

I was having trouble with this, and none of the suggestions worked. But I figured out that since my audio control keys are also the function keys, Excel was hijacking them. There is a way to lock that ( I must have accidentally unlocked it). Holding down "fn" and "shift/fn lock" fixed my issue.

Hope this helps someone else. 😊

I just solved this problem for myself again. I've had this problem before, solved it, and forgotten the solution.

For me it was Spotify which hijacked my media keys. Spotify didn't respond correctly, and I'm using multiple desktops, so I didn't know it was running. Once I opened it, I saw it was responding to media keys (play/pause), and once I exited it, YouTube in Chrome began responding again.

I'd like to say a big f*** off to Spotify for this behavior, and Microsoft also for just generally being so difficult to troubleshoot after all these decades.

Maybe get out of the vaccine and GM mosquito business and focus on a better UI/UX for the world's leading OS (and yes, I know that's Billy G and his foundation, not Microsoft technically, but it's all the same damned big business club. Don't get me started on Google/YouTube. "Don't be evil" my ****. Oh, it auto-blanked out a-r-s-e. Wow, how PC).

My fix was closing iTunes.