Enable or Disable Global Media Controls in Google Chrome

Brink · 26 Dec 2020

Tutorial now updated to work again.

Feral · 27 Oct 2021

Thanks for the guide! This information helped me disable another chrome feature, casting. I previously disabled casting through chrome's experimental flags feature, but as of a recent chrome update (likely 94) the flags were removed and casting was forced on once again.

There are countless threads across the web spanning at least 5 years (likely around the time casting was introduced) asking how to disable this feature. There are many suggestions out there such as the aforementioned flags, browser extensions, ad/script blockers to block the cast buttons, vpns, separate wifi networks, etc. The only one that properly disabled casting were the flags which are now gone.

To disable casting, use the same command line parameter in this guide but replace GlobalMediaControls with MediaRouter. So it'd look like: --disable-features=MediaRouter . You can also simultaneously disable both casting and global media controls by separating the features with a comma: --disable-features=GlobalMediaControls,MediaRouter . I also wanted to mention that when you disable MediaRouter, it also disables any other devices on your network from showing up in Chrome's play/media control button. This is great because you can still use the feature to control media from just your own chrome browser.

It would probably be help a lot of fellow humans out there if you made a guide for disabling casting too. Also, do you happen to know of any documentation that has a list of all features that can be enabled and disabled in this way? I searched the web and some Chromium documentation but I'm unable to find more than a handful of features listed.