Problem with keyboard interaction and JQuery/Jplayer

Problem with keyboard interaction and JQuery/Jplayer

I want to use JQuery/JPlayer for a media art installation in which viewers can play and pause different videos on a screen by pushing a physical button.
I therefore "connected" the play and pause function of JPlayer to a keyboard key.

I'm a complete newbie in JQuery/JavaScript, but after two days of trial and error fiddling I got the code to do exactly what I want except for one thing that I can't wrap my head around:

Here is my fiddle:
http://jsfiddle.net/beluga/dYKgX/10/
You can play or pause the video to the left with the letter "i" and the video to the right with the letter "o". This works, at least on my ThinkPad, with a German keyboard, Firefox 19, Windows7 64bit.
I set the videos up to start playing and to repeat automatically when the page loads.

Here is my problem:
When the page first loads it takes two key pushes to pause eather one of the videos.
Then, for the video that was paused last, it only takes one push to play it again,
but for the other video it takes again two pushes, and so on.
I want to get both videos to play or pause with only one push of a button at all times.

This is the JavaScript I used for "connecting" the keys to the play/pause function:

var pause = false;
var play = false;

$(document).keydown(function (e) {
     if (e.keyCode == 73 && (!play))  {play  = true;  $("#jquery_jplayer_1").jPlayer("play" );}
else if (e.keyCode == 73 && (!pause)) {play  = false; $("#jquery_jplayer_1").jPlayer("pause");}
});

$(document).keydown(function (e) {
     if (e.keyCode == 79 && (!play))  {play  = true;  $("#jquery_jplayer_2").jPlayer("play" );}
else if (e.keyCode == 79 && (!pause)) {play  = false; $("#jquery_jplayer_2").jPlayer("pause");}
});

Does anybody know why I would have to push the button twice at times ?

Thanks so much for any ideas, solutions, help or insights !