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Picture-in-picture (PIP) is one of those features that is more useful than you initially think and is dead-simple to use on Chromebooks. While watching a video on multiple different services, you can simply pop out the video player and place it anywhere on your screen and it stays on top of all your other content.
One service I’ve used this with quite frequently of late is MLB.tv. Baseball, being one of those sports you don’t have to pay attention to every single second, lends itself to this sort of passive consumption. I can’t wait until YouTube TV adds the ability to utilize this feature! For now, services like YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo and even local content work with the extension that is made by Google to leverage PIP across devices.
Over time, it seems Google wants to make the PIP player mimic what users are used to on the standard video players of the respective services being used with PIP. One of those features is the ability to mute audio when needed, and it is being added right now in the Dev Channel of Chrome. It works just as you’d expect, giving the user a dedicated button to kill the audio when needed.
All you have to do to get this working is:
- Get your Chromebook or Chrome on Windows/Mac/Linux into Dev Channel. If you aren’t familiar with what that is or what it means, it’s probably best for you to just wait for this to hit the Stable Channel.
- Go to chrome://flags
- Search for Experimental Web Platform features
- Switch it to “enabled” and restart Chrome
With that complete, the next time you pull up a PIP instance, you’ll have a nice mute button there waiting for you to use. Another great perk is that all this works on the new version of the Microsoft Edge browser assuming you are using the newer, Chromium-based version.
We expect to see more of these features hitting the PIP player in the coming weeks, so keep and eye out for more about this as we see it develop.
SOURCE: Tech Dows
