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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

It is a little clunky and could use a good deal of polish. For example, you can only PiP one video, and controls remain in the tab with the video frame. PiP only gives you play/pause, no scrubbing or anything from the embedded player. The always on top is a feature for some, but can be a hindrance, too. That behavior should be a toggle for the user so they can use their tools how they like.

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These are a few of the reasons I've continued to use the "Open With" extension with mpv. ([right-click]->Open With->mpv) This provides full playback control, lets me toggle stay-on-top, etc. Firefox's PiP is a nice thought but just isn't right for me as currently implemented.

Sorry, which extension is this? The only one I was able to find named "Open With" is pretty clearly not what you were referring to.

MPV is a player. https://mpv.io/

Oh, I know all about MPV. Invoking it cleanly from within Firefox is the part I was asking about (and which has been answered :)

I prefer this one as it is potentially more secure than some of the other ones

https://github.com/grmat/play-with

This is the one I currently use: https://github.com/darktrojan/openwith Perhaps play-with is a better choice.

samesame

also;

* rank up the cache settings in mpv to prebuffer the whole vid

* see the ytdl-format setting in mpv.conf to select a codec that your machine can decode in hardware for enhanced power efficiancy (lower fanspeed)

if you like vim like keybindings courtesy of tridactyl

bind V hint -W ! mpv to show a letter or letters adjacent to all links and open the one chosen in mpv. Normally most pages have few enough links visible that hints are either 1 or 2 characters. This means instead of picking up the mouse you can hit 3 keys.

You can get most pages down to 1 character if you craft your own custom selector, e.g. https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/dc8919e7e65d5dfa...

For the record we don't recommend piping straight to `!` as a malicious (and fairly Tridactyl specific) site could use it to execute whatever it wanted. We have a default bind for open in mpv that sanitises things - https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/dc8919e7e65d5dfa... using https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/dc8919e7e65d5dfa...

Thanks. A question occurs to me shouldn't such sanitation be its own step in order to be generalized to anything that the user wants to run?

That's what I do as well, and it's fantastic. Bonus functionality: Get MPV to always open on the second screen fullscreen (if you have one) and have it be always-on-top, small and on the bottom right corner when non-fullscreen, so you can just press Esc on the full-screen mpv window and get a PiP-like window.

if it's not always on top, why break it out of the browser window at all? maybe i just haven't used it enough for your request to become apparent to me, but it seems counter intuitive on first thought.

I really like Firefox PIP, but it's not perfect yet. I have missed the "timeline" so it would be easy to jump back if I wanted to re-watch the last bit. But I have noticed now that if the PIP window is active the arrow keys works for that which is great and it's also possible change volume with up/down arrow. So what a most miss now is that the PIP window remember its size and position from last time. Right now (on youtube) different resolutions gives different window sizes.

I wish I could get subtitle support on Netflix. Their app doesn't allow you to resize when its as always on top. PiP allows me to position it where and how I want, but lacks subtitles :(

IIRC there was a firefox extention that popped out anything into a browser window with a simple header. You'd have a quarter inch of header, but it would be like a poor mans PiP and you'd end up with more controls at your disposal than the native firefox solution.

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