Building Firefox's Picture-in-Picture Support • Hacker News Board

Re: Building Firefox's Picture-in-Picture Support

#101

Post by aasasd » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 1:53 AM UTC

Fnoord wrote: post #79

darau1 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either awesome or i3 used to allow me to fullscreen a video, then pop that fullscreen video out into it's own floating window, that I could then stick on top of all other windows, and make it stay on every workspace. Really cool way to get a hacky picture in picture mode way before firefox did this.

VLC has a feature called "float on top". Together with resizing, it allows basically something akin to picture in picture mode. You can use VLC to play YouTube videos by downloading them with youtube-dl. That is what I used before Firefox PiP mode was available in stable.

VLC can play YouTube directly―at least if YouTube didn't change the format again. Just ‘open’ the URL as a network source.

Re: Building Firefox's Picture-in-Picture Support

#102

Post by huxflux » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 1:54 AM UTC

I've been waiting for this feature for years, and in my eyes, this seals Firefox as the number one browser out there. Previously to that, I was using Opera exclusively for this feature.

Re: Building Firefox's Picture-in-Picture Support

#103

Post by aasasd » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 1:56 AM UTC

MayeulC wrote: post #91

cpeterso wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am told that Firefox Nightly now allows you to use keyboard shortcuts to seek the video. Part of the problem here is that there are some sites that have special logic around seeking, so having playback controls on the PiP popup can cause the original page's custom controls to get confused or out of sync.

That would be great. My main use-case is watching youtube videos. When watching a video, I often pause (space) to have a better look at what's on the screen [-> rewind (left)] -> play (space) I absolutely loathe youtube's "suggested videos" that pop in my face when I try to focus on a specific frame. I never used that feature, it's just a way to shove ads in my face. Moreover, if I close it, the open/close button is…

Suggested videos can be ‘disabled’ with rules in uBlock Origin or other extensions. I'm not at the desktop so you'll have to search the web for the exact element classes/ids.

Re: Building Firefox's Picture-in-Picture Support

#104

Post by megavolcano » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 1:58 AM UTC

I've been using PiP in Opera for years, glad to see other browsers starting to implement useful features.

Re: Building Firefox's Picture-in-Picture Support

#105

Post by aasasd » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 2:05 AM UTC

jpalomaki wrote: post #24

sdan wrote: post #13

Picture in Picture is great for lectures or follow-along tutorials and I'm glad people are taking it more seriously (initially was using Youtube on Safari purely because of this feature, but later on Chrome had it... albeit a bit wonky, I started using it on Chrome normally).

I would love to have an external controller for start/stop/fast forward/rewind when watching tutorials on Youtube. For example a controller [1] people are using to edit videos. Quite often I would like to pause the video for a while, repeat last 30 sec or by-pass some boring segment. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Contour-Design-Shuttle-Xpress-Multime...

It's doable as an extension that communicates with a native program. There are already such extensions for media buttons, you might want to look among them―some may allow you to reconfigure the keys. Search for ‘media keys’ in the extension store.

However, rewinding is probably not among standard functionality of these extensions.

Re: Building Firefox's Picture-in-Picture Support

#106

Post by thrtythreeforty » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 2:31 AM UTC

GeneticGenesis wrote: post #75

Mozilla's choice to add their own pip button is a massive pain for anyone developing video applications - anywhere over the player can't be considered a safe space to add our own buttons anymore, it really feels like Mozilla didn't talk to any video service developers when deciding how to approach this problem. Pip needs to be common API driven (as Chrome is) to make building portable video applications possible. A t…

Maybe this is inconvenient for developers, but as a user, it feels awesome to know that the browser is technically capable of doing something, and does it when I ask, not at the behest or limitation of the PiP API. You know YouTube/Google would put this feature of my browser behind a Premium paywall.

So much of the modern web is "run your code on my computer," so this feels nice, where the browser is my tool to browse the web.

Re: Building Firefox's Picture-in-Picture Support

#107

Post by aasasd » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 2:43 AM UTC

sverhagen wrote: post #22

With (some) television sets in mind that popularized (for, um, me at least) the picture-in-picture term as one channel of video on top of another channel of video, it feels weird that the term is here used when only a minimum of 1 videos is involved...

You're witnessing etymology in work:

- the mechanism is about the same: the video stays in the corner

- the term ‘picture in picture’ is already familiar to people, from TVs

...so the term is generalized. Happens a lot. If the feature gets popular and the term sticks around, decades later people might search the web for ‘why is it called PiP when it's not what it does’. We can even imagine that zero videos may be involved by then (though unlikely―there are other terms for that.)

Re: Building Firefox's Picture-in-Picture Support

#108

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 2:56 AM UTC

MayeulC wrote: post #91

cpeterso wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am told that Firefox Nightly now allows you to use keyboard shortcuts to seek the video. Part of the problem here is that there are some sites that have special logic around seeking, so having playback controls on the PiP popup can cause the original page's custom controls to get confused or out of sync.

That would be great. My main use-case is watching youtube videos. When watching a video, I often pause (space) to have a better look at what's on the screen [-> rewind (left)] -> play (space) I absolutely loathe youtube's "suggested videos" that pop in my face when I try to focus on a specific frame. I never used that feature, it's just a way to shove ads in my face. Moreover, if I close it, the open/close button is…

[deleted]

Re: Building Firefox's Picture-in-Picture Support

#109

Post by hombre_fatal » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 3:03 AM UTC

drannex wrote: post #60

This is honestly one of my favorite features in firefox.

fwiw you can get this feature as an extension in Chrome and Safari.

for example, this is published by google: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/picture-in-picture...

Re: Building Firefox's Picture-in-Picture Support

#110

Post by hombre_fatal » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 3:06 AM UTC

GeneticGenesis wrote: post #75

Mozilla's choice to add their own pip button is a massive pain for anyone developing video applications - anywhere over the player can't be considered a safe space to add our own buttons anymore, it really feels like Mozilla didn't talk to any video service developers when deciding how to approach this problem. Pip needs to be common API driven (as Chrome is) to make building portable video applications possible. A t…

The other browsers have it implemented as an extension that adds a button to the browser's chrome which I think is a better place. I too think it's a bit ham fisted to inject UI like this. Though I admit that Firefox's impl is obvious to the average user where a new, vague button icon in the browser's chrome is not.