Using Picture-In-Picture With YouTube

The ability to move video into a picture-in-picture overlay with macOS Sierra is a great new feature. However, it doesn't appear to work with YouTube videos. You can get YouTube videos to do this, however, if you know how.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: So one of the great new features of Sierra is the ability to do picture-in-picture. You will be watching a video and you can tuck that away in a corner and do other work.
Here's how it may work on the web. Here's a trailer at Apple's website. When you rollover with your cursor you can see an icon there for picture-in-picture. Sometimes the icon looks a little different. It depends how the movie is presented on the website but you can click it and you then get picture-in-picture.
You can see how now this is now an independent little window. I can resize it a bit. I can go back to putting it in there. I can do what I want with it. I can dismiss it. I can get rid of Safari completely and go into another app and the video is still there.
It's a really handy feature except for one problem. It doesn't work for YouTube.
So, for instance, I'll go in here into MacMost's YouTube site and here's a video. I can start playing a MacMost video and notice that there is no picture-in-picture button here. That's a shame because YouTube makes up a pretty good portion of the types of video that people want to play.
But there is a way to get picture-in-picture from YouTube.
The way to do it is to Control click on the video. However when you do that you don't get picture-in-picture. You get a special menu provided by YouTube. If you Control click a second time though you get the default menu from Sierra. That includes picture-in-picture and will put the YouTube video in picture-in-picture.
So the key is to Control click once, Control click again and then choose picture-in-picture. Now you can watch YouTube videos in a corner of your screen while you do other work.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Using Picture-In-Picture With YouTube”

Lynn Hicks

8 years ago

After activating Picture-In-Picture for Youtube you can also move the video around "anywhere" on the screen when holding down the Command/Cntl key.

Bill (William)

Fascinating. Thanks. I don't know how you find out all this stuff!

Gary

Wow! thanks once again Gary

Comments Closed.

Using Picture-In-Picture With YouTube

Comments: 3 Responses to “Using Picture-In-Picture With YouTube”

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