I mean it's limited to content managed by the browser, whereas the native WM way works for all apps.
I guess I don't know enough about how WMs work. :( 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.
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)
I mean it's limited to content managed by the browser, whereas the native WM way works for all apps.
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 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.
If you don’t like window decorations (and I don’t blame you) just run a wm with no window decorations (like cwm.)
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.
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).
The amount of video/audio player clients in general that don't have a seek function is, quite frankly, astonishing to me.
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).
Even the youtube shortcuts don't work (J/L for long seek and left/right for short 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…
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.
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.
I mean it's limited to content managed by the browser, whereas the native WM way works for all apps.
I guess I don't know enough about how WMs work. :( 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.
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.
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.