We’re first to report Chrome is getting Picture in Picture mode, its now finally available in Chrome 69, but not enabled by default. The process of doing that is tedious, you need to visit about:flags page and enable a couple of flags and then after restart you need to play a video on YouTube and right click on it and select ‘Picture in Picture’, not intuitive at all. Why a user to need to enable flags to get a feature working in a stable version that is available to the public, surprising and not good from Google side.
In our opinion Opera has implemented Video Pop Out feature neat, they’re still improving it and sometime back they’ve added Back to tab button to take you original video.
If you’re eager to try PIP mode in Chrome, no one can stop you from doing so, follow the steps below for that.
Turn on Picture in Picture mode in Chrome
Ensure you’re using Chrome 69
1. Visit about:flags and enable the following experimental features
Enable Picture in Picture
Enable the use of SurfaceLayer objcts for videos
2. Relaunch the browser, visit YouTube, play any video
3. While a video is playing, right click on it and select ‘Picture in Picture’, now a floating video window appears at the bottom right corner of Window.
The video stays on top of other application windows and offers a pause button, you can move the PIP window and place it anywhere on screen you like and continue to browse, meanwhile, the original video will inform you’ The video is playing in picture-in-picture mode’.
Chrome picture in Picture vs Opera Video Pop Out
1. Lacks a proper button to initiate Picture in Picture mode, Video Popout in Opera offers a button.
2. Supports YouTube only, whereas Opera’s works in Vimeo and Dailymotion also.
3. Chrome offers Play/Pause control only whereas Opera’ Video Pop Out player has its own controls. For instance, including to play/pause button, the player offers Volume Control also.
How happy are you with Picture in Picture feature in Chrome browser?
It’s probably too limited too use at the moment. without playback controls
Opera’s is definitely better. But the extension “Separate Window” for Chrome provides all of the features of the web player. Combined with something like DeskPins to keep it on top makes it another solution.
Opera’s is more appropriate for the average end user, whereas Google has pretty much opted to only open the gate, leaving extension developers to push you through it. Sadly, even power users like myself can’t seem to find ways to easily match Opera’s feature set using Chrome’s official way of doing things.
Shame, that. Usually official ways of doing things require less fidgeting, are generally tested for good performance. I wouldn’t expect other extensions that try a hacky, less elegant way around this to care much about the end user’s performance.