How to disable the media on screen display popup on Windows 10

Question

With Windows 10, certain media players (at least MediaMonkey, Amazon Music, Spotify ... probably most of them) display a horrible and annoying popup on the upper-left part of the screen whenever you press a media command on your mouse or keyboard. It has the volume, track name, album name, and some controls.

I thought there would be an option in the apps to disable this garbage, but the people at MediaMonkey say that the "only way to disable that on screen display (OSD) is remove most of Windows API Media support."

On a different forum I read that Spotify does have a preference setting to turn off the OSD, but I haven't confirmed it.

My hope would be a simple registry key change that disables it for all apps, but on various Windows forums they say there is no way to disable the media OSD.

However, the MediaMonkey people also recommended an app called HideVolumeOSD that purports to hide the volume OSD next to the media player, and maybe (hopefully) also disables the player OSD (but it doesn't claim to).

So my question: is there a known and reliable way to disable the media OSD on Windows 10?

Answer 1

UPDATE: Sept 2023: The HideVolumeOSD v1.4 application no longer works to hide the volume onscreen display in Windows 10.

Currently there is no solution to this other than changing the OS.

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While waiting for a canonical answer of the "right" way to hide the media OSD, I went ahead and installed that HideVolumeOSD app because it is repeatedly proposed as the only way to solve the issue on various forums and blogs.

It immediately fixed the problem without restart or hassle.

I still suspect there is a Windows-based (e.g. registry) way to fix this, but I don't know what it might be. If somebody has a solution like that, then it's a better answer.