Play/Pause and stop media keys not working

Anonymous
2022-01-24T02:02:23+00:00

Hi everyone,

So I've got a weird problem, and I haven't found anyone else with the same issue.

For some reason the play/pause and stop media keys on my keyboard (K55) aren't working. If I test it on keyboardchecker.com it says MediaPlayPause and MediaStop, so the keys itself do work. I've tried it with both Spotify and VLC, and it they not do anything. Other keys like previous track, next track and volume controls work fine. It's just the play/pause and stop keys that don't work. Nothing happens.

Anybody got any clue as to what's going wrong here?

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Input and language

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  1. Paulo GM 72,645 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2022-01-24T03:43:21+00:00

    Hi Martijn,

    Do you have extensions on your browser that you suspect could hijack the media keys even when the browsers are closed, specifically Google play music or other media player extensions? Please try disabling them if you have and see if that works

    Another thing, try setting a default media player and see if that fixes the problem. Go to Settings > Apps > Default apps > Music then choose a player. Do the same with Videos and try setting VLC as default and see if that would work.

    If still not working, since you mentioned that you have an external keyboard, try plugging it into another port and see if it's just a simple connection problem.

    For Spotify, try toggling on/off the option "Show desktop overlay using media keys" in (...) > Edit > Preferences > Display

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-11-15T16:06:36+00:00

    100%, I can recreate this by making or receiving a call in Teams, and then it hijacks the play/pause and stop keys, but previous/next still work normally.

    This wasn't an issue a few months ago, hopefully this can be fixed by Microsoft...

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-10-28T23:04:04+00:00

    So this only works when you close/reopen Teams UNTIL you make/receive a phone call (we use Teams phone system) so this doesn't help actually solve the problem for me unfortunately.

    Is there a way to stop Teams from hijacking my media controls permanently?

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-06-15T20:47:55+00:00

    Having the same issue described, and having the button work properly if I hold the Windows key, after seeing some answers about VoIP applications I decided to check for apps. Apparently, RingCentral (Zoom-like/teams app) has a phone function, I closed the app and started it back again. Now everything is working. It seems some of these VoIP apps might be hijacking the play/pause button when a call comes in, and restarting the app/restarting the machine fixes the problem for the most part ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-01-30T08:51:25+00:00

    Ok so this issue has been there since the update on 14th of Jan as on my PC Atleast and to be sure enough i ve tried to my extreme as i could and found out that the issue was with the OS itself to some extent. Windows Media Player is the only app that responds alone to the play/pause/next/prev and none other app would even detect it(not even when i increase my vol through buttons). Also none of the keys work for me (Play/Pause/Stop/Next/Prev) [Windows Media player is an exception though] Could anyone just see if any other thing left or so?

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