Just like he said, that involves touching the screen and opening a menu. There's no predictable way to immediately silence your phone.

You can predictably silence it before it happens with the above method. Just drag the "music" volume to zero.

I'm not sure what solution they're looking for. A single universal volume control where if you turn up a video it means your ringer is now on full blast? 6 volume buttons on the side of your phone to adjust them each individually?

Android's system of adjusting media volume when media is playing and ringer volume when it isn't seems like a reasonably clean solution. It takes a single tap to expand to the three sliders.

Maybe a shortcut where where pressing volume up/down simultaneously mutes everything?

It's not that exotic, you've got a child or a sleeping partner or a boss in the same room and you want to watch a mostly visual video without any unnecessary jingles or other audio cues from disturbing them.

So you reduce the volume, but it only reduced the ringer for calls, which isn't what you want.

As the sibling answer says, newer Androids can do this. One click to display the volume, a touch to see the individual controls and then slide.

Or swipe down the top drawer and tap the Sound setting to Mute.

> A single universal volume control

This is exactly what I want.