Media Center Buttons not working

I know this is an old thread, but it came up as a top search result so I thought I'd throw a reply in here. I was having problems with my media remote buttons not working properly. The Pause/Play and skip buttons weren't functioning. I had just installed the IR remote, and thought that it must somehow not be installed correctly. What was worse was that soon afterwards I found out that my keyboard's media buttons were now not functioning right either. I spent two days trying to figure this out! Eventually I found that it was the Google Play Music extension that I had running in Chrome that was causing the issue. Apparently, just before I had installed my new remote, Chrome had updated itself in the background. All that I knew was that just prior to installing my remote control my keyboard's media keys were functioning. Talk about coincidence. Anyway, I disabled the extension, and was good to go! Hope this helps someone out.

Thank you so much for the comment by snatr titled "Just a tip". I had lost the stop and skip buttons on my MCE remote about a week ago. I did a system restore which fixed them. When it happened to me again today, I went to do the system restore again. Before I completed it, I chose the option to show me affected programs. I was confused to see Google Chrome as the only program it showed that would be affected. I did a Google search and found this for him stating the issue was a Google play extension in Google Chrome. I opened chrome, found that I did have the Google play extension, and removed it. Upon launching media center, I instantly had my buttons back. I probably would have continued to doing system restore's on a biweekly basis if I would not have found the suggestion!

Snatr: Awesome insight!!! I got my remote control skip forward and back working! All I did was disable the Google Play extension like you suggested and voila! I can not tell you how thankful I am to you. I registered just to say all of that. Thanks again mate!!!

"Just a tip" saved my media center PC. This issue was one of the most frustrating I have encountered in many years of building and using media center PCs. I tried restoring 8.1 pro, reverting to Windows 7 and finally starting fresh with new install of 8.1. I could tell it had to be software since all the above methods worked briefly. I doubt without this thread that I would have ever solved which software it was tho since the browser updated itself in the background. Great work, and many thanks to snatr! I only wish this solution popped up much sooner in my Google searches. Who would have thought Chrome was the cause? It took me nearly a month to happen upon it. Cheers, and thanks again!

I also registered just to thank snatr. We actually bought a new remote and when that didn't work we got a new ir sensor too! We thought it had to be hardware because when we hooked the old ir sensor up to a different system with a different os the remote still didn't work. Of course, now I know that it was because we had chrome on that system too lol! 5 minutes after finding this thread and a problem that has plagued us for weeks is resolved. Thank you!

I know this is an old thread, but wow, this really saved me from going round the twist.

I bought an EMC remote for use with Kodi on Win7. Tried it and all worked fine. Then all of a sudden play, pause and stop didn't work. I tried messing about with the keymaps and all sorts, but to no avail. I then tried the remote on another pc and it did the same thing. So I started to doubt if it had ever worked correctly and I was simply losing the plot.

I was about to give up when I saw this post. Whilst I don't have a Google Play add on in Chrome, I do have a Plex add on. Once I disabled that, the buttons started working again. Yay!! I guess I didn't have Chrome running when I tried it the first time.

Thanks guys.

NitroNate said:

i had a similar problem with my remote. turned out i needed to turn on the "Human Interface Device Access" service and set it to Automatic. once i did this, all the buttons immediately started working. who woulda thunk it? why some of the buttons worked and some didn't is beyond me.

it's a windows service in Control Panel->All Control Panel Items->Administrative Tools->Services

This post is very dated, but I must express my appreciation that this fix is still posted.

I have been many days on and off trying to find a solution and was about to do a clean install of Win 7. I decided to check online once again and finally found this.

Not only did it solve my remote key problems, but also the problem of Media Center not doing scheduled recordings even without using the remote. THANKYOU!