I've been using it with their Dev Edition and it works very nicely for me. On a Mac, it blends in with the design language, and works on just about any video, even video that's been DRM'd to hell and back (Netflix, Hulu, etc).
I've been using this a lot lately for YouTube videos so I can watch a video and keep web surfing. Works great, though the PiP doesn't have all the controls (e.g. volume and seek).
PiP is such a great feature. I have no idea how easy/hard it was to implement but it feels nice to use. It does exactly what you'd expect it to do and nothing more.
I use it while watching overwatch league games in the browser because it allows me to resize the popped-out video arbitrarily, instead of the site's embedded youtube player options of either tiny-window-in-browser or full-screen sizes (there is no theater mode in the embedded player for some reason).
It is a little clunky and could use a good deal of polish. For example, you can only PiP one video, and controls remain in the tab with the video frame. PiP only gives you play/pause, no scrubbing or anything from the embedded player. The always on top is a feature for some, but can be a hindrance, too. That behavior should be a toggle for the user so they can use their tools how they like.
I wish I could get subtitle support on Netflix. Their app doesn't allow you to resize when its as always on top. PiP allows me to position it where and how I want, but lacks subtitles :(
IIRC there was a firefox extention that popped out anything into a browser window with a simple header. You'd have a quarter inch of header, but it would be like a poor mans PiP and you'd end up with more controls at your disposal than the native firefox solution.
These are a few of the reasons I've continued to use the "Open With" extension with mpv. ([right-click]->Open With->mpv) This provides full playback control, lets me toggle stay-on-top, etc. Firefox's PiP is a nice thought but just isn't right for me as currently implemented.
if you like vim like keybindings courtesy of tridactyl
bind V hint -W ! mpv to show a letter or letters adjacent to all links and open the one chosen in mpv. Normally most pages have few enough links visible that hints are either 1 or 2 characters. This means instead of picking up the mouse you can hit 3 keys.
That's what I do as well, and it's fantastic. Bonus functionality: Get MPV to always open on the second screen fullscreen (if you have one) and have it be always-on-top, small and on the bottom right corner when non-fullscreen, so you can just press Esc on the full-screen mpv window and get a PiP-like window.
if it's not always on top, why break it out of the browser window at all? maybe i just haven't used it enough for your request to become apparent to me, but it seems counter intuitive on first thought.
I really like Firefox PIP, but it's not perfect yet. I have missed the "timeline" so it would be easy to jump back if I wanted to re-watch the last bit. But I have noticed now that if the PIP window is active the arrow keys works for that which is great and it's also possible change volume with up/down arrow. So what a most miss now is that the PIP window remember its size and position from last time. Right now (on youtube) different resolutions gives different window sizes.
If you're interested in seeing it getting implemented, you can check out Mike Conley's YouTube channel. He regularly streams Firefox development and he's the main force behind PiP in Firefox. I believe the first episode where it's mentioned is #165 [0] but it spans over many of them.
A long time ago, I wrote the PIP feature for browsers on the very first version of Android based Smart TVs (Phillips TVs). It used Mozilla's Gecko NPAPI plugin ( their version of WebKit) and built on top of Opera, the only one at the time that would support funnelling broadcast TV data at the time.
It was pretty challenging, but still way more easier than trying to build with Safari, chrome. I always wondered why this feature never really became mainstream until now.
I've tried it, it's awesome. The things I'm missing in that new window are progress bar and volume control. Or at least I haven't seen a way to make them visible.
I've been using this since it was launched and I constantly forget that I need to keep the browser tab open for PIP to work. Doh. Would be cool if the PiP window was another instance of the native window with its zero-decor.
They do? As in, paying will expose a control on their player to enter PiP in supported platforms?
Note: other than FF, you can also trigger PiP (edit: on Safari) on a YouTube video by double-right-clicking on the video element OR long pressing on the speaker icon on the tab/address bar.
> other than FF, you can also trigger PiP on a YouTube video by double-right-clicking on the video element OR long pressing on the speaker icon on the tab/address bar.
Neither of these worked for me. Chrome 83 on Win 10.
YouTube app on Android supported this some time ago. If you were playing a video and then wanted to go to some other app, a small floating window appeared with that video playing.
It was then locked away behind YouTube Premium, and now YouTube (non-premium) occasionally bugs you to pay for the premium when you try switching to another app so that you can continue playback.
PiP works on Firefox (and likely Chrome, haven't tested) for Android.
iOS just announced PiP support, but formerly on iPad had PIP. A quick google shows that PiP does work for Safari on iPad.
First, right-click on a YouTube video. You'll see their custom menu appear first. Now, right click next to their menu (while still somewhere on the video frame.)
You should then see the browser contextual menu with 'Picture-in-picture' in the list of options.
Doesn't Chrome do this too? If you click the music button in the toolbar, you can pop out a video to an always-on-top window that you can watch overtop of other apps.
«Toddler duty» is a fantastic marketing approach to the feature! (While I usually deprecate using videos to entertain toddlers and kids, using it to have them close to you looks… good I guess)
I'm not sure I understand what you mean about browser tabs.
This pops the video outside of the browser's chrome, so you can drag it wherever you want.
They implemented it in Firefox because Firefox is the one detecting and playing the video? MacOS already has a similar feature, but AFAIK it only works in Safari.
It can't. (on some platforms, the video ends up on a compositor subsurface, but so can many other portions of an app so trying to make a PiP feature out of that would probably not work well)
But you don't want it to be limited to plain video players - videoconferencing apps, games, and various real-time data displays etc are good fits to pip too. You are able to pipify any window without the app having to explicitly support it.
I think the main point of this feature is that it breaks the video out from a window in the existing page.
I can then interact with that video separately from the page. I can scroll around on the page, I can open other links. It decouples the video from the page.
There's lots of ways to open new chromeless window, or set a window always-on-top. That totally makes sense to be in a wm, but that's not all this is doing, right?
Right. It should send the stream to the system video player. If you then want no window decorations or whatever you go to the video player app developers.
This pops out the <video> element, so it works on 100% of websites with one. You can use tools like youtube-dl to extract/convert a lot of websites' video to a playlist compatible with external players, but it will never have as complete coverage.
The PIP video is independent of the browser window that contained the video -- it can be moved around the desktop and resized with no window decorations and also stays on top of all other windows in the desktop env.
there's a lot of firefox users that don't want to switch to a new window manager (or operating system) just for the sake of being able to pop a video out of the window it came from.
This makes sense on one hand, but could also be used to justify all kinds of of non browser features that would make both WMs and FF worse off in the long run.
It is still pretty dependent on that browser tab. Accidentally close that tab, there goes your video. You also lose controls like scrubbing, and can only PiP one video at a time.
Opera has had this feature for years and features more playback controls than FF. It seems many features start on Opera then get "invented" in other browsers afterwards.
You're right that it has been in Opera for years. Specifically it was introduced back in 2016. But Maxthon had it first, introducing it in 2010. Snaps or webpage screenshoting as well (2010), which was later put in Opera (2017) and recently on Firefox.
> play alongside while you go about your business on
> other tabs or do things outside of Firefox.
Do we need to watch video while we go about our business?
You better finish your business or the video.
Which leaves me thinking: this is kind of bloat.
Same here. FF on Mac. I’ve been using it since lockdown began in the UK in March. It’s been really handy to keep BBC News in the corner of the screen when the Government was doing daily briefings.
The linked article was posted on January 6th, 2020. For some reason many people received an email about it today. Must have just been a soft rollout and now they are starting to actually publicize the feature?
This seems like a massive feature that I can't believe hasn't been baked into Chrome yet. I know Safari has an implementation but it always feels limited and of course cannot be used on Windows or Linux.
I need to put this through its paces, but it may vault Firefox back into the role of my default browser.
First, right-click on a YouTube video.
You'll see their custom menu appear first.
Now, right click next to their menu (while still somewhere on the video frame.)
You should then see the browser contextual menu with 'Picture-in-picture' in the list of options.
This should be more of a desktop feature. I'd like to play video wallpaper on gnome/wayland for example. I think this is as much on the desktop devs as the browser devs, if not moreso.
I use this feature on a daily basis, in fact it's running right now. I have a few UI issues with it, the resize border is much too hard to hit, it would be nice to be able to click the video to pause, and I would like to see a progress bar and mute buttons. That said it has already been a "game changer" for how I view video every day.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadI use it while watching overwatch league games in the browser because it allows me to resize the popped-out video arbitrarily, instead of the site's embedded youtube player options of either tiny-window-in-browser or full-screen sizes (there is no theater mode in the embedded player for some reason).
Not as accessible as Firefox for sure.
https://github.com/grmat/play-with
also;
* rank up the cache settings in mpv to prebuffer the whole vid
* see the ytdl-format setting in mpv.conf to select a codec that your machine can decode in hardware for enhanced power efficiancy (lower fanspeed)
bind V hint -W ! mpv to show a letter or letters adjacent to all links and open the one chosen in mpv. Normally most pages have few enough links visible that hints are either 1 or 2 characters. This means instead of picking up the mouse you can hit 3 keys.
For the record we don't recommend piping straight to `!` as a malicious (and fairly Tridactyl specific) site could use it to execute whatever it wanted. We have a default bind for open in mpv that sanitises things - https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/dc8919e7e65d5dfa... using https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/dc8919e7e65d5dfa...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_5zwg9Ucoc
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/01/how-we-built-picture-in-pi...
Note: other than FF, you can also trigger PiP (edit: on Safari) on a YouTube video by double-right-clicking on the video element OR long pressing on the speaker icon on the tab/address bar.
Neither of these worked for me. Chrome 83 on Win 10.
It was then locked away behind YouTube Premium, and now YouTube (non-premium) occasionally bugs you to pay for the premium when you try switching to another app so that you can continue playback.
I've been using pipifier for this - especially for Netflix, didn't know about this until now - thanks
Not sure if it's possible to get a browser-based YouTube video to go PiP on iOS Safari.
You should then see the browser contextual menu with 'Picture-in-picture' in the list of options.
They implemented it in Firefox because Firefox is the one detecting and playing the video? MacOS already has a similar feature, but AFAIK it only works in Safari.
I'm curious how the WM could detect that the a portion of a window is playing video, and break that out into it's own movable window?
I'm not sure how you do that without the browser managing that.
I can then interact with that video separately from the page. I can scroll around on the page, I can open other links. It decouples the video from the page.
There's lots of ways to open new chromeless window, or set a window always-on-top. That totally makes sense to be in a wm, but that's not all this is doing, right?
And i watch a lot of simracing with multiple streamers streaming the same race.
> play alongside while you go about your business on
> other tabs or do things outside of Firefox.
Do we need to watch video while we go about our business? You better finish your business or the video. Which leaves me thinking: this is kind of bloat.
Yes, and don't tell me how to do my work.
I need to put this through its paces, but it may vault Firefox back into the role of my default browser.
But there is a PiP button in the "hamburger with musical note" menu in the toolbar.
It seems Google has an optional PiP Chrome extension as well. It looks like it just makes the button more visible.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/picture-in-picture...
You should then see the browser contextual menu with 'Picture-in-picture' in the list of options.