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I was searching for what that sound and media tool (The panel which name I could not find) is governed by, so that I can set, what apps have access to it. Specifically, I would like to know, how to do two things:

1) Give access to Windows Media Player (chrome, spotify or VLC work fine)

2) Set it so, that when I hit the "play/pause" button on my keyboard, it will either stop everything or start playing the active media. Now it sometimes stops one media and starts another, when Windows Media Player is open

I suppose the solution of 2) will be closely related to 1)

I run on Win 10 on HP Gaming Pavilion - 15-cx0017nc

Thank you for any references and help.

Sairaight
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1 Answers1

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So.. First of all (directly from the source code of one of the programs designed to hide it) the SMTC controls* pop-up is a NativeHWNDHost and/or DirectUIHWND child window of explorer.exe (presumably from dui70.dll) You can also verify this with WinSpy++.

I don't think there's any built-in mechanism to deal with its interaction with specific applications, AFAIU the thing just works with a pool that receives events from all the system and that's it (of course you can always use/code a program that hijacks these calls but I guess this is a story for another time). Just like I'm skeptical this could be a WMP problem, given that it's a first-party program (maybe some older version of the other programs you mentioned were bugged like here? Or perhaps OEM bloatware could be the culprit?)

You can actually do something with 2), though. Putting aside that most applications should allow you to toggle their media keys integration in their settings, you could remap your hotkeys to a different action. This can be done either "globally" at the keyboard level or just specifically to Explorer (the secret is using the ShellExecute override to run SendKeys, VBScript or AHK).

*and yes, I understand this is akin to an "ATM machine" situation, but so Microsoft refers to it.

mirh
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