Today I was wondering about the following situation: a video was paused on Youtube in Chrome or Edge and suddenly the video was automatically started again. Even without using the play button or hitting any key on the keyboard or the mouse. It turns out that the Hardware Media Key Handling feature of both browsers was responsible for this but it could be fixed easily.

In Chrome insert the following into the address bar:

chrome://flags/#hardware-media-key-handling

In Edge you can use the following:

edge://flags/#hardware-media-key-handling

Then set the value of Hardware Media Key Handling from Default to Disabled. After that restart the browser and it should work again. This feature is usually used to control media in the browser with keys like volume up/down, play/pause.