In Chrome 70, one of the latest features allows you to enable picture-in-picture. When activated, the playing video appears in a resizable floating window that can be dragged anywhere on your screen.
Experience picture-in-picture on Youtube
To see how it works, just watch any Youtube video, right-click it twice, and click the ‘Picture-in-picture’ in the context menu.
When active, a small rectangular icon appears within the tab that has the picture-in-picture video. Moreover, the video overlay can be resized and moved anywhere on the screen. Also, when Chrome is minimized, the video remains on top of everything else. It suits best for people who always do multitasking.
For now, only Youtube supports this feature and enabled by default. To apply on other video sites, a Chrome extension is required.
François Beaufort made the extension simply named it Picture-in-Picture. He posted the details on dying Google+. Good thing, it’s open source, the source code is available on Github.
How to install and use Picture-in-picture extension for other video sites
- To install, go to Chrome web store – extensions. Search for Picture-in-Picture Extension (by Google). Then click Add To Chrome, and confirm.
- Once installed, an icon appears on Chrome’s toolbar.
- Now, go to Vimeo, IMDB or any video sites. Then play a video and click the PiP icon. A floating video window should pop up.
Take note that in Picture-in-picture mode:
- The video has simple play/pause buttons, plus the ability to close.
- There are no seeking controls.
- A video must be playing before it can be used.
Enable ‘experimental features’ to support PiP in Chrome 69
By the way, the Picture-in-picture function is already supported since Chrome 69, however, it needs a little setup. In the address bar, copy and paste the following Chrome flags one by one. Change ‘Default/Disabled’ to ‘Enabled‘ for each.
chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-web-platform-features chrome://flags/#enable-surfaces-for-videos chrome://flags/#enable-picture-in-picture
Other Chromium-based browsers such as Avast, Opera, and Vivaldi also support this feature. It applies to beta and latest stable versions only.
Update: Google already took over this extension as a developer from François Beaufort.