Watching Video With Picture-In-Picture On a Mac

You can use Picture-In-Picture to watch a video on your Mac while you do other things. It places the video in a small window that floats on top of other windows. You can use Picture-In-Picture on web videos, the TV app, and other places.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use Picture-in-Picture on your Mac. 
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So sometimes you want to watch a video on your Mac while you're doing something else. Maybe you're doing research on the video you're watching or you just want to watch something while you're working or playing a game or whatever. You have the ability to actually watch a video in a small window called Picture-in-Picture while you use another app or apps on your Mac. But how you do that really depends on which app you're using to play the video and where the video is from.
Let's start off here in Safari because this is probably one of the most common ways to watch video in the web browser. So let's say you're going to go and watch a video in the web browser like this one and instead of watching it here you want to have it go to Picture-in-Picture so you can watch it while doing something else. So how you do that really depends on how the video is embedded in the webpage and there are many ways to do it. Different sites will do it different ways. Some sites have their own unique way of doing it. Here I'm using a customized video player at my site and you can go to Picture-in-Picture with this button right here. You click that and you could see the video comes out here. This is just blank now and it tells me that it is playing a Picture-in-Picture. I can now hide Safari and Picture-in-Picture stays here. I can move it to any corner of the screen I want by dragging. I can continue playing here. I can close the video completely here or click here to return to where the video came from. In this case this webpage.
Picture-in-Picture almost always floats above everything else. So here in the Finder if I do a new Finder window you could see how that's behind it. If I open up, say, Notes you can see that that is behind it as well. It will always stay on the top. Also sometimes you can resize Picture-in-Picture by dragging a corner. So I can make this pretty small or large to about a quarter of the size of the screen.
Now I said different sites will do it differently. So for instance let's go to Archive.org and here's a video here. If I play this you can see the video player looks very different but there is a Picture-in-Picture button right here that you can select and move the video to a corner like that in Picture-in-Picture mode. Now one site where it's very different is YouTube and this is probably where most video is watched. So you won't find a Picture-in-Picture button down here in Safari but you can still do it. In fact a lot of videos that don't have a Picture-in-Picture button can still be viewed in Picture-in-Picture if you either two-finger click on a trackpad, right click on a mouse, or Control Click on the video. But if you do that in YouTube the first thing you see is this special YouTube video. It doesn't even look very Mac-like. It's got different kinds of icons and fonts and everything like that. There's no Picture-in-Picture option. The actual Context Menu doesn't come up the first time that you Control Click. But the second time you Control Click you can see now the official Mac Context Menu appears and this includes Picture-in-Picture. So the trick is knowing you have to do that twice to get to the real Context Menu, go to Picture-in-Picture and now this will work just like any other Picture-in-Picture window here remaining on top, allowing you to move it to corners, and all of that. I can hide Safari now and do other things while watching this YouTube video in Picture-in-Picture mode.
But how about other video playing apps. One is QuickTime Player where you use to open up any video and play it. Now QuickTIme Player is kind of Picture-in-Picture just by default here. I mean it's a little window and you can shrink it. You can move it to a corner if you want. It fills the entire window. You can see when I move the pointer away there's not even any controls there. So it's kind of Picture-in-Picture by default. But the thing that you won't get is it won't be in front of everything. You can see how I can easily hide the video there. But you can do that by going to QuickTime Player, make sure you have that selected, go to View and there is Float on Top here. So you can select that and now this window floats on top of everything. If I try to put notes on top of it it won't go. So you've got Picture-in-Picture mode kind of through the Float On Top which is even better than normal because I can put it anywhere I want and I can size it just about anyway I want and I have a full set of controls.
Now another place that you can use Picture-in-Picture is in the TV app. Of course the TV app is where you're going to have any movies that you've purchased or rented and TV shows and such. To demonstrate here I just dragged in one of my own videos so it appears under Home Movies since it's not something from Apple and I can play this and it will go full screen. Let me pause it there and I can use this button here at the bottom right and it will go into Picture-in-Picture mode. Then the familiar mode here with all of the same options.
So there's a look at various ways you can use Picture-in-Picture mode on your Mac. Of course if the video player in a website doesn't support Picture-in-Picture there's really not much you can do. The same thing for different apps. They may or may not have a Picture-in-Picture mode. It's really up to the app developer and perhaps even the content embedded in the app.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 2 Responses to “Watching Video With Picture-In-Picture On a Mac”

Kimmo

3 years ago

Hi! To select the pip, right click the speaker icon in the address bar and choose pip. To place the box anywhere, click and hold the command key while dragging the box. Keep the command key pressed and click the box again, the box remains there. If you release the command key without clicking the box, it goes into the corner.

Jerry

2 years ago

When I 2 finger click on trackpad on Netflix i only get a small menu that lists "Back" to "Inspect Element"

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Watching Video With Picture-In-Picture On a Mac

Comments: 2 Responses to “Watching Video With Picture-In-Picture On a Mac”

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