Most of us play media content on our computers or devices. For those who watch content on computers, we would know the keyboard shortcuts for the most common commands. Different players have different shortcut keys for the same type of action. This makes things not so intuitive. Everyone has their own thoughts on what are the best controls.
Other than streaming services, I use MPC-HC and sometimes VLC to watch video content. I also watch a lot of content on YouTube. These programs don’t have the same way to make content fullscreen, mute, or skip to the next file. Back in the 90’s Microsoft created dedicated media keys to help unify some of these keys. However, they were quite limited. I preferred to use my own shortcuts that made sense to me. After getting frustrated that each program has different shortcuts, I decided it would make the most sense if they were all the same. Programs like VLC, MPC-HC, Winamp, Foobar, PotPlayer have customizable hotkeys. Thus, why not make every player as similar as possible. Use M as the mute, Space for Play/Pause, etc.
For me, YouTube is my most used video player but those hotkeys cannot be customized. Because the controls are fairly good to begin with, I used these as the primary template on how I customize my other player’s control. Thus I made every player now uses F to go to full screen for example. Did you know that YouTube can jump forward and back frame-by-frame? This can be useful if you want to spot a particular frame (comma and period). I made VLC and MPC-HC have the same keys do the same thing. With this idea, I can easily remember all the different shortcut keys regardless of the player I am using.