Buzz
Previously, Picture-in-Picture (PiP) was only supported within the canvas of the page as a small window, and only displayed within the current webpage as users scroll up and down the page.
Chrome is experimenting with Picture-in-Picture API to display compact video playback outside the browser.
Several other platforms have supported picture-in-picture mode, but those are OS-specific APIs, functioning across all video apps rather than just browsers.
If you've used the Coc Coc browser, you're probably familiar with the video pinning feature, right? If not, check out how to pin videos on Coc Coc here.
New Web API just released
The Web Platform Incubator Community Group (WICG) at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has just released details of browser-specific APIs to standardize picture-in-picture interaction, allowing websites to open small video windows outside the browser window.
According to François Beaufort, a software engineer at Google, explaining back in January, when he proposed the idea of a browser-specific API: 'Many users want to continue using multimedia while interacting with other content, websites, or apps on their devices.'
'The Picture-in-Picture API is proposed to allow websites to start controlling these behaviors,' François Beaufort added.
According to the new API details, websites will have the ability to control the timing of opening or closing PiP popup windows, set window sizes, adjust custom overlay settings, restrict specific interactions within the popup window, and collect analytics data when users open or exit PiP and how they use it.
According to Bleeping Computer, during testing, they discovered that the PiP extension will display most of the tested small video windows, meaning the feature doesn't rely on website owners changing their code to work.
Chrome and Safari are exploring a new API
Google Chrome and Safari are two browsers set to integrate the Picture-in-Picture API. In the Safari browser, Apple has integrated the Picture-in-Picture API prefix since iOS 9 and macOS 10.
Although the proponents of the new Picture-in-Picture API are none other than two Google engineers, Chrome has not yet integrated this new API. The Chrome development team is currently planning experiments to assess whether the new API is useful or not. If everything goes smoothly, the Picture-in-Picture API will be integrated into Chrome for users.
The testing process will begin when Chrome 68 is released to the Beta channel (scheduled for June 7, 2018) and will end when Google rolls out Chrome 69 Stable (scheduled for August 30, 2018).
The feature is now available for Google Chrome Canary users. While waiting, if you want to experience it early, you can activate this feature right now by following the steps below:
Step 1: On chrome://flags, enable the following flags:
#enable-experimental-web-platform-features
#enable-surfaces-for-videos
#enable-picture-in-picture
Step 2: Download and extract the Zip extension file HERE
Step 3: In chrome://extensions, enable Developer mode (located in the top right corner) if it's not already enabled.
Step 4: To load the extension, click Load Unpacked.
Step 5: In the dialog that appears on the screen, locate and select the src/ folder from the location where you extracted the Zip file.
Step 6: Navigate to any YouTube video and click on the browser extension toolbar icon to enable Picture-in-Picture for the current video.
The Firefox and Edge development teams have not taken any action to integrate the new API into their browsers. Opera also integrated a similar feature into its browser back in 2016; however, this feature is not based on the W3C API.
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