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Pretty simple question, but I haven't been able to find an answer. All I want to do is disable the media player controls that appear on the Windows 10 lock screen. The screenshot below shows what controls I mean:

enter image description here

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  • See if some music app(s) are listed in Settings > Personalization > Lock Screen > Choose Apps to Show Quick Status.
    – harrymc
    Jun 28, 2019 at 20:42
  • 2
    @harrymc no luck - none of them are in that list.
    – Ian
    Jul 1, 2019 at 13:56

3 Answers 3

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10

In Chrome go to chrome://flags/#hardware-media-key-handling and set that to "Disabled": Screenshot

Explanation:

I was able to find a way to hide this feature per-browser. This is part of the Media Session API that browsers are implementing lately. You can disable it by going to your browser's flags config page and disabling media session service.

Source: Disable Media Control Overlays on Chrome and Edge browsers in Windows 10.

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  • Does this disable the keyboard controls as well?
    – levant pied
    May 20, 2022 at 14:47
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    @levantpied - yes it will disable all hardware controls including keyboard controls.
    – AutoBaker
    Sep 15, 2022 at 13:00
4

There's a Group Policy edit which will fix this for your computer. This isn't app specific and will work for anything that is playing.

  1. Open Group Policy Editor (run gpedit.msc)
  2. Then navigate to: Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Personalization
  3. Find and open the option called Do not display the lock screen option
  4. Enable this option and OK / apply your way our of the screens.
  5. Restart your PC.

This is a workaround and not specifically targeted towards the media controls appearing issue but I can confirm it works! It disables the lock screen which prevents the media controls appearing.

The advantage of this is that is still allows the media controls to be available when you're logged in. If you edit the chrome:// flags to prevent hardware media control, this will prevent you from controlling media via the sound popup or keyboard shortcuts.

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2

If you only need to disable the media controls overlay for Spotify (this seems to be the case), then you can do it from the Spotify side of things by going to:

Spotify (app) -> Edit -> Preferences -> Display -> "Show desktop overlay when using media keys"

Otherwise, I don't know how to help you

Sourced from here.

Cheers!

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  • 1
    I know about this, but my goal is to disable it for all apps. Ideally I'd still like to keep the media controls linked to the volume changer if possible.
    – Ian
    Jun 28, 2019 at 16:46
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    I did some research and nobody seems to know how to disable this within windows itself, instead of by app. I took a quick look in the registry and didn't find anything. Sorry.
    – johnbchron
    Jun 28, 2019 at 17:14
  • I am also curious if anybody knows how to do this for all applications (so it would work, for example, for both chrome and foobar2000).
    – jippyjoe4
    Mar 24, 2020 at 16:55

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