Using Picture-In-Picture With YouTube

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.