Weird floating Youtube widget, how to stop it?

In the last hour (and never before that) I'm starting to see a floating control widget appear when I'm watching Youtube videos in chrome. In addition to that, the videos I'm watching randomly stop and start (not buffering related). As far as I know, I did nothing to instigate this (like changing any settings or installing anything). It just started. Here's a screenshot of what this thing looks like:



I've tried right-and-left clicking on it and it doesn't appear in the task bar. It's totally ruining my ability to watch anything on youtube right now because it's stopping the videos at random. For a 5 minute video I'm having to click start dozens of times.

- - - Updated - - -

I have noticed that it's stopped happening so much now (almost to nothing but not quite). The only thing I did was change the affinity of ffmpeg.exe which was busy converting some video files. I reduced it from 8 cores to 4 cores. It's as if that annoying widget popped up when Windows felt that it was unable to play the youtube videos without problems. Despite the fact that when they were playing, there was no buffering or stuttering.

So I might have found the cause, but I'd still like to find out how to control that widget thing. If anything, I'd like Windows to have given ffmpeg less cpu (rather than me having to enforce it myself).

AuraticTrance said:

Did you check the list of extensions on chrome ?

Thanks for the suggestion, I had checked that. This is Windows doing this. I don't think a chrome extension could know the CPU usage, and it's definitely (proven now) that it was only happening during > 95% cpu usage. It was like Windows was thinking "I can't guarantee I can reliably render these youtube videos while the CPU is being slammed so much". It's an admirable thing that it cares about my entertainment experience, but I'd rather it limited the CPU hog task(s) to help me, rather than randomly pausing the video instead and offering me a control widget.

It is not a Windows 10 problem, it is a Chrome Browser configuration...

Put chrome://flags in to the address bar.

Search for "Media" ...

Select the "Hardware Media Key Handling" > in the drop down box select "disabled"
Restart Browser.

Helmut said:

It is not a Windows 10 problem, it is a Chrome Browser configuration...

Put chrome://flags in to the address bar.

Search for "Media" ...

Select the "Hardware Media Key Handling" > in the drop down box select "disabled"
Restart Browser.

Thanks Helmut. That certainly sounds specific enough to be the actual solution. I've marked it solved despite not being able to test it because (a) I'm not doing any video conversions any more, and more importantly (b) I'm in a video conference call for the next 6 hours so can't relaunch chrome

No worries. Google does enable some of these "must have Browser features" for some users without notification.

Everyone knows about the current situation and such things can be irritating.

Frabnkhs said:

I think it's a Windows 10 thing because the same widget shows up with Opera Web Browser
Does anyone know if being part of Win 10 is true?

Didn't Opera switch a couple of years back to using Chrome/Webkit as their base code and they wrap it in an Opera UI ? They might have inherited this functionality as a result of that. </speculation>

It's a Windows mechanism, it works with whatever application enables it, Skype, Spotify, even foobar2000...