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Building Firefox's Picture-in-Picture Support

hacks.mozilla.org

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

#71

Post by Jestar342 »

idoubtit wrote: post #59
Jestar342 wrote: post #19

People using tiling window managers like i3 or sway should get friendly with this feature. It allows me to "full window" (note: not screen) netflix/amazon/YouTube videos in a tile which was impossible to do without PIP.

> impossible to do without PIP. This is not my experience. I see no added value in this PIP. I use XMonad, which is a tiling window manager. I've always been able to put a video into applicative full screen, then switch the layout to whatever I want. E.g. 2 browsers windows each playing a borderless video. Before XMonad, I remember that when I switched to another workspace/window and back, my browser window would hav…

There's a reason I mentioned only i3 and sway, they stick to managing _windows_ and thus only inform the application of their window size. Screen size is unabated by them, thus when applications that have a full screen mode size-up they get the real screen size. I3 author(s) specify purity as their reasoning for this and I actually agree with them. There are some other nuances with full screen that tie into this, too, such as signalling to the app to enter full screen instead of simply resizing the applications window means in most cases the user gets a more intuitive result.

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

#72

Post by Jestar342 »

darau1 wrote: post #41
Jestar342 wrote: post #19

People using tiling window managers like i3 or sway should get friendly with this feature. It allows me to "full window" (note: not screen) netflix/amazon/YouTube videos in a tile which was impossible to do without PIP.

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.

Yep, sticky containers. Allows you to stick a container to an output, floating above all workspaces on that output.

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

#73

Post by tomxor »

Jestar342 wrote: post #19

People using tiling window managers like i3 or sway should get friendly with this feature. It allows me to "full window" (note: not screen) netflix/amazon/YouTube videos in a tile which was impossible to do without PIP.

I3 can already do floating sticky windows which is essentially the same thing. It used to be possible to pop Chrome into a floating window from full screen but now both browsers fall out of full screen when floating - maybe this will bring it back - or is that what you meant?

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

#74

Post by Merg »

Everything old is new again it seems. Anyone used Maxthon Browser before? It was multiengine browser, which used both Webkit and Trident under the hood. It has that feature for ages, just for flash content back than.

If only someone would built good email client into Browser like old Opera, that would be godsend. Opera and Maxthon were ages ahead in terms of certain features.

It is little weird for me, they ended up putting video within shadow DOM container.

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

#75

Post by GeneticGenesis »

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 terrible misstep from Mozilla. (And yes, this has been repeatedly raised on the bug tracker with no answer)

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

#76

Post by tetris11 »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #56
prook wrote: post #46

At first I didn't even realize this was FF feature (I suspected something like gstreamer, but was lazy to investigate). Now that I know it is indeed FF, I just cannot wrap my head around it... 1) I can pause the video, but cannot navigate it. I guess the navigation would be there if it was technically possible, but from practical standpoint this makes it useless even if it appealed to me in other ways. Popping a vide…

I use this all the time to watch Netflix while programming: put Netflix in PiP mode, then put the resulting window in the corner and switch to other applications to work.

Same, also for YouTube, KimCartoon and many others.

The reason I mention them is because the window ID of the PiP is fixed, meaning that I can easily define a window rule for it in my desktop environment independent from Firefox

I'm loving this.

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

#77

Post by tetris11 »

darau1 wrote: post #41
Jestar342 wrote: post #19

People using tiling window managers like i3 or sway should get friendly with this feature. It allows me to "full window" (note: not screen) netflix/amazon/YouTube videos in a tile which was impossible to do without PIP.

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.

Yep, but now you have a video window with a fixed window title, regardless of Tab, which makes it infinitely easier to programming window rules for.

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

#78

Post by Fnoord »

prook wrote: post #46

At first I didn't even realize this was FF feature (I suspected something like gstreamer, but was lazy to investigate). Now that I know it is indeed FF, I just cannot wrap my head around it... 1) I can pause the video, but cannot navigate it. I guess the navigation would be there if it was technically possible, but from practical standpoint this makes it useless even if it appealed to me in other ways. Popping a vide…

My main complaint is that subtitles don't work with it (on Netflix, at least).

You don't have to use it. For me, it works when I'm trying to dual task on a single monitor. For example, I use it regularly on my smartphone (with a native video player).

As for the example you mentioned: the issue is autoplay. Netflix just rolled out an update when they allow you to disable that non-feature.

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

#79

Post by Fnoord »

darau1 wrote: post #41
Jestar342 wrote: post #19

People using tiling window managers like i3 or sway should get friendly with this feature. It allows me to "full window" (note: not screen) netflix/amazon/YouTube videos in a tile which was impossible to do without PIP.

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.

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

#80

Post by ubercow13 »

idoubtit wrote: post #59
Jestar342 wrote: post #19

People using tiling window managers like i3 or sway should get friendly with this feature. It allows me to "full window" (note: not screen) netflix/amazon/YouTube videos in a tile which was impossible to do without PIP.

> impossible to do without PIP. This is not my experience. I see no added value in this PIP. I use XMonad, which is a tiling window manager. I've always been able to put a video into applicative full screen, then switch the layout to whatever I want. E.g. 2 browsers windows each playing a borderless video. Before XMonad, I remember that when I switched to another workspace/window and back, my browser window would hav…

That sounds more like xmonad isn’t honouring WM hints properly? Might be handy but is that a ‘failing’ of mainstream window managers?
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