Hacker News Reader

Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

> Firefox now supports simultaneously watching multiple videos in Picture-in-Picture.

Is Adderall the new Aspirin? Or is there some WFH use here that I'm missing.

While I usually limit myself to one video playing on the computer, when following live events it can happen that you want to have two streams running. E.g. the multiple channels streaming the Starship test flights or watch one video while waiting for another stream to come online.

I was exactly thinking about the Starship test flights for this. I think that's the only time I've ever had more than a single video playing at once.

For a serious answer, here's some links:

https://w3c.github.io/picture-in-picture/

https://github.com/w3c/picture-in-picture/blob/master/explai...

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/10/watch-vide...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1463402

https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5729206566649856

Looks to me like it is a standard that web devs requested (e.g. so you can scroll down YouTube or whatever and the video will keep playing in the corner), which Firefox chose to also make an end-user UI for.

I think the parent is primarily referring to the multiple aspect of it (PiP was already supported).

Sports immediately comes to mind - Some people I know who are really big into sports like watching/keeping track of multiple games at once.

This is a game changer for sports bettors.

Me personally, will probably stick to one video playing in the background. It's more for ambient noise. On days when there are 4 nba games going on simutaneously, I'm far too busy fiddling with my spreadsheet/nba feed to be actually watching the game.

Not only multiple games, but also multiple viewpoints of the same game. Twitch added support for that use case for esports (I think as part of their deal with Overwatch League).

I watched NASA's stream of Perseverance landing on Mars. It would have been cool to watch a few different landings streams at once since one had good narration and another had better footage.

I never understood this feature either. I can already make multiple browser windows if I want. Definitely not interested in PIP.

I like that I can scale the video as I want. Like on a news-site the only options are often a small inline viewer or full screen. So I use PIP often for that even though I'm staying on the page.

And it's just more convenient than trying to maximize the space of another browser window and making it stay put above other stuff. No extra chrome, no wasted inline space on the page. I can just take a Blender tutorial for instance and move directly above my Blender window and it obscures as little as possible.

Browser windows have decorations that take space. I don't use PIP often, but it comes in handy when I have limited screen real estate, like watching Netflix on my sidearm in tablet mode, while simultaneously doing something on the web.

This is something better solved at the window manager level. E.g. what if I want to have a PIP in my Xterm?

How does a window manager get rid of Firefox's browser chrome?

Answer: it doesn't.

The problem is browsers have two layers of decoration: the WM layer (which tiling window managers tend to remove), and the internal layer - the tab bar, address bar, option buttons, borders, etc.

As far as I know, there isn't a way to remove all that without going full screen.

In the very first version of firefox with full screen mode it ended up doing just that, rendering full screen inside a normal window area in my tiling WM. It was likely a bug/unimplemented feature at that stage, but to be honest it would have been nice to have as an option prior to pip.

For me it makes the fullscreen videos cover only the Firefox window, so they effectively can serve as PIP windows. To be honest, I have no idea how to enable it outside of XMonad, it just worked like this on XMonad many years ago when I switched to it and I actually liked this behavior so here we are.

Right but xmonad is very idiosyncratic in that behaviour. I don't know of any other window manager that behaves like that, and while it seems useful in Firefox, it doesn't make much sense to ignore fullscreen requests from an application like mpv which has no chrome anyway, or say a video game which expects to be fullscreen and doesn't know how to dynamically scale its UI down when the window isn't the size it expects.

PiP seems to be a cleaner solution.

Sure, if you have a window manager that solves the problem that's great. The rest of the world can use Firefox's inferior integration while they wait for their window manager to get that feature.

Most web pages only support two video sizes:

1. unusably small 2. full screen. Which often means unusably large (27" screen), especially for less-than-HD videos

At least youtube added at some time the cinema mode which allowed the video to occupy the whole window width, that is what I use most of the time. Still, PIP also has the advantage of removing the window decorations, so saving space. Also, they are floating on top of all other windows, which helps, but also occasionally can be annoying.

I shared the initial reaction the first time I heard about it but completely changed my mind after using it. The big win is for poorly designed sites like YouTube which use non-standard controls and waste a significant majority of the space. I have hot keys to resize windows to screen quarters or halves but for anything less than full screen on my laptop a YouTube video will have less than half of the window devoted to the actual content and the browser chrome will reduce that even further.

If there’s something I’m watching but not giving my full attention to - say an event hasn’t started yet or someone will be landing a rover on Mars in an hour - this means that I can either have a big chunk of my screen wasted or I can use PiP and have just the thing I care about using a quarter of the space but showing considerably more of the actual content.

Plus, it uses well-tested standard controls so I don’t have to play games figuring out whose <script> kiddies don’t think about keyboard shortcuts or test their event handlers.

Following along with a tutorial would be a big use case.

PIP also has pin-on-top feature, I believe letting you place the video in a corner over an expanded, in-focus application.

I don't get it either, personally, but I remember reading around high school (90s) a book called "Boost your Brainpower" or something like that. They mostly recommended lots of visualization (they said the trick is to say out loud what you are seeing to improve) but also had a suggestion to watch multiple televisions at the same time, suggesting it would be helpful in some way or another that I have long since forgotten. I never tried any of those, but hopefully in a decade we'll be reading about "the browser feature that boosts your brainpower" and not "the browser feature that made the amphetamine crisis even worse".

I have a fitlet running a pygtk 4screen vlc showing me 3 news networks and a music stream on my 3rd monitor. I can click each one to mute/unmute, mousewheel up/down to change the relative volume, and the entire thing is compeltely separate from my

I can have 4 different sources on at the same time (music in the background - quiet, one of the news channels a bit louder if I'm waiting for something to happen, a corporate all-hands zoom call I'm half listening to on the main computer, and maybe a short video or meme, it's usually 2 or 3 though.

I don't use pip much as the one site I'd use it on (twitter) works hard to stop the video playing as you scroll down anyway.

Following a group of streamers at the same time is ideal for this. Currently you need to use 3rd party services.

When I watched YouTube regularly I would often have multiple videos going. Some people talk slowly and YouTube encourages filler in order to hit the 10 minute mark. When most of the videos are like this you can definitely have a couple monologues, some music, and something to read just fine.

You can speed up videos on Youtube. Both natively and with yuotube-dl then play locally with mpv or your (lesser) favourite player.

This was less clicks and faster.

Clicking on the gear in the youtube player allows you to set playback speed. Most videos are very watchable on 1.25x or 1.5x speed, on videos that are basically just filler with some information in between I even go to 2x

I have two, as yet unsolved, work from home use cases:

- I often would like to watch one team member update Trello or Mural, at the same time as another updates Github, while I update a contract. I'd move those streams to my 4k monitor, to keep them readable, while I work on my primary.

- If I'm running a demo to a client, I'd like to have one stream sharing the demo platform, while another shares video of my haggard face, and a third shows my presentation. I don't want to share my whole desktop, to avoid sharing slack or SMS notifications.

OBS can probably do #2. Nothing does #1.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com