Global Media Controls is a perfect addition to Chrome (can be enabled in Chromium Edge also) to control audio and video playing in the browser, Google calls the new UI as “media hub”. The feature is already available in the stable version and its icon can be seen on the toolbar when music is playing. GMC UI offers controls to pause/play, go to previous/next track, now the Chromium team has added another option to it to launch the playing video in Picture-in-Picture mode.
For the unknown, Chrome’s Picture in Picture mode is based on Web API and needs to be supported by websites to work whereas Firefox’s PiP is browser UI feature, works on all websites for most of the videos.
To watch a video in PiP mode in Chrome, you have to right-click on a video twice and need to select the option. This is not intuitive, Opera and Firefox overcome this by showing an icon for Video Pop-Out and Picture-in-Picture. Though Chrome Evangelist Francois Beaufort developed an extension to address this, this sort of thing should be native or built into Chrome for PiP, than relying on the extension.
READ: Chrome Picture in Picture Mode vs Opera Video Pop-Out
Now Google within the latest Chrome 82 Canary offering a new flag, if you enable it, Picture-in-Picture control will appear for videos in GMC.
Enable Picture-in-Picture Icon in Global Media Controls UI in Chrome
1. Visit chrome://flags in Canary 82
2. Enable the following two flags and relaunch browser.
- Global Media Controls Picture-in-Picture
- Global Media Controls.
3. Play any video to notice PiP icon GMC, click on it to get the video in a mini window.
Related articles:
Chrome now lets you manage All Media Playback including in Incognito Windows from the toolbar
Chrome Picture in Picture mode now shows Previous and Next Track buttons for Playlists on YouTube
Chrome 78: “Mute” and “Skip Ad” buttons removed from Picture in Picture Window [Updated]
Chrome on Android is getting Picture in Picture mode