Keyboard shortcuts worth knowing on Windows

The Windows app uses the keys you already know from every other media player. There is no custom scheme to learn. There is one rule about live TV, and everybody hits it once.

The rule#

On live TV, the transport keys only work when the player owns fullscreen.

On the Live TV browsing page, pressing M does not mute and pressing F does not go fullscreen. They do nothing to playback, because the channel list is right there and letters are how you type-ahead to a channel name. Arrow keys move the selection rather than seeking.

Go fullscreen and the whole map switches on. That is not an inconsistency. The app has decided a visible list has a better claim on the letter keys than a preview window does.

On-demand playback has no such conflict, so everything works everywhere.

The map#

Space, K        play / pause
M               mute
Up / Down       volume, 5% per press
F, Alt+Enter    fullscreen
F11             fullscreen (outside immersive live)
Escape          close stream info, else exit fullscreen
Ctrl+P          picture-in-picture
I               stream information

Left / Right    seek. On live this timeshifts 10s; on demand it uses the skip step
J / L           back / forward 10s          (on demand only)
Home / End      jump to start / end          (on demand only)
0 - 9           jump to that percent         (on demand only)
Shift+< / >     speed down / up              (on demand only)
Shift+N / P     next / previous episode      (shows only)
Ctrl+Left/Right previous / next chapter      (films only)
PageUp/PageDown next / previous channel      (live only)

The parts worth a sentence each#

Volume moves in 5 percent steps, which is small enough to be usable and large enough that 4 presses is a noticeable change.

Speed is a ladder, not a slider. Six values: 0.5, 0.75, 1, 1.25, 1.5 and 2. A press finds the nearest one to where you are and moves one place, clamped at the ends. So it lands on 1.0 exactly rather than on 0.98. That is the whole point of a ladder.

Escape is layered. If the stream information panel is open, Escape closes that and leaves fullscreen alone. Press it again to leave fullscreen. Nearest thing first, which is what you want with two things open.

Number keys jump by percent, so 3 goes to 30 percent. On-demand only, for an obvious reason: there is no 30 percent of a live channel.

Ctrl+P is picture-in-picture, and it is a real second window rather than an overlay: the video surface is migrated across windows and keeps playing. This is desktop only. The console head compiles a stub that reports picture-in-picture as permanently inactive, because a console has one screen.

Two implementation details explain oddities. The speed keys are handled by raw key code rather than by name, because the comma and period keys have no named members in the platform's key enumeration. If a future layout ever reports those keys differently, speed is the shortcut most likely to be affected. And one guard I did not expect to need: player pages listen even for keys already marked handled, so the global handler checks that flag first. Without it a single press would seek or toggle twice.

Using them with two screens#

The combination that makes a work machine usable is Ctrl+P, or a second window on a second monitor, plus M. Picture-in-picture survives being moved between displays. That took a swapchain migration to get right, and it is verified as part of the playback pass.

For the full second-screen setup, watching live TV on a second monitor covers window placement, audio, and the settings worth changing so a background channel costs less.

If you want more than one channel visible at once, the keys stop being the answer and multiview starts being it.