My browser is not *my* media player

A recent update in Chrome (Blink) based browsers added the functionality to control media playing via the media buttons on your keyboard. As a side effect you can also control media on a remote system if you use something like KDE Connect. But what if you don’t want this behaviour and want your media controls to just control your actual media player?

Why enabled by default?

Here I just use chrome because I don’t have an existing profile for it. But the situation is equally true for Vivaldi and Opera (probably other Blink based browsers too, but did not test those).

So when I go to a website that does media, I can now control the playback of it via my media controls. I think this is a nice feature, but why is it enabled by default? And not to be found in the settings? I would rather have this in the settings than hidden in the flags, this is an intruding feature, which should not be hidden away this far.

Turn it off

So I want this turned of in all my browsers. Currently we have to use the flag #hardware-media-key-handling. There you can disable the feature.

Now the media controls are off and you can be sure your default media player will react to your media keys.