Picture-in-Picture often abbreviated, as PiP is a handy way that allows you to watch videos in a floating window outside the browser window or on top of any other application. It allows you to work and interact with other applications while still being able to watch the video.
The Picture-in-Picture mode works on all platforms like Windows, Linux, macOS, and ChromeOS. To use picture in picture mode, you will need to enable two features in your Google Chrome browser. After enabling the feature, you will need to right-click twice on the video to use the picture in picture mode. However, note that you can play only one PIP video at one time on the screen.
Not every video will be played in pip mode. However, YouTube and daily motion will work in pip mode.
In this article, we will see how to try picture in picture mode in Google Chrome. We will use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS OS for describing the procedure mentioned in this article. However, you can use the same method in earlier versions of Ubuntu.
Enabling picture in picture mode in Google Chrome
For picture in picture mode to work, make sure you have the latest version of the Google chrome available. To check if any updates available, click on the three vertical dots at the top right corner of your browser, then go to Help > About Google chrome. If there will be any updates available, it will automatically look for and download updates.
Step 1: Open Google Chrome in your Linux operating system. Then in the address bar, type the following address.
chrome://flags/#enable-picture-in-picture
Change the setting from Default to Enabled by using the drop-down menu in front of the option Enable Picture-in-Picture.
Step 2: Then type the following address in the address bar of Google Chrome:
chrome://flags/#enable-surfaces-for-videos
Once again change the setting from Default to Enabled in front of the option Enable the use of Surface Layer objects for videos.
Step 3: Now you will need to restart the chrome browser as prompted. Click on Relaunch Now button to restart the chrome browser.
Step 4: Once you have completed the above steps, you can now test the new PIP feature.
To test PIP mode, open up any video, right click on the video twice, and from the appeared options menu, select Picture in picture option. As soon as you select the option, you will notice your video in a floating window on the bottom right corner of your screen.
Now you can move the floating window around the screen, resize the video, play, and pause the video. To close the video, click on x button at the corner of its window,
When the floating window initially appears, it is small. You can make it bigger or even smaller, by stretching its corners. Place the cursor on the edge of the video and stretch it to the size you want.
Here you can view the floating video on File manager window.
Here is the view of floating video on Ubuntu desktop.
That is how you can enable picture in picture mode in your Google Chrome browser. However, make note that if you shut down the main browser window, it will close the floating window too. You can also turn off this feature if you find it useless by disabling the two features described in step1 and step 2.
