The Split-Screen Struggle
You are a student watching a two-hour lecture on YouTube, and you need to take detailed notes in a Microsoft Word document. If you only have a single laptop screen, this is incredibly frustrating. If you make the video full-screen, you cannot see your notes. If you try to place Safari and Word side-by-side, the video becomes too small to read the professor’s whiteboard.
Most users resort to constantly pressing Command+Tab to switch back and forth between the video and the document, losing their place every few seconds.
To solve this, Apple integrated a feature called Picture in Picture (PiP) directly into macOS and the Safari browser. When activated, PiP extracts the video player out of the web browser entirely. It creates a floating, borderless, resizable video window that sits permanently on top of all your other applications. You can maximize Microsoft Word to fill your entire screen while the video continues to play flawlessly in the corner.
Activating PiP in Safari (The Right-Click Trick)
Picture in Picture works natively in Apple’s Safari browser. It works flawlessly on standard HTML5 video players, but platforms like YouTube try to hide it behind their own custom menus.
To force YouTube into Picture in Picture mode, you must use a specific “double right-click” trick.
- Open Safari and navigate to the YouTube video you want to watch.
- Start playing the video.
- Right-click directly on the center of the video player. YouTube’s custom black menu will appear (showing options like “Loop” and “Copy video URL”). Ignore this menu entirely.
- Without moving your mouse, right-click a second time. A completely different, white Apple system menu will appear.
- Click Enter Picture in Picture.
The video will instantly vanish from the YouTube webpage (leaving a black box with a message) and reappear as a floating window in the corner of your Mac screen.
Controlling the Floating Window
The PiP window is designed to be completely unobtrusive, but it is highly customizable.
- Resizing: Hover your mouse over any corner of the video window. Click and drag the corner to make the video larger or smaller.
- Moving: Click and hold the center of the video to drag it to any of the four corners of your screen. It will magnetically snap into the corner so it doesn’t float awkwardly in the middle of your document.
- Hiding: If you temporarily need to see what is behind the video, click and drag the video completely off the edge of your screen. It will slide out of view, leaving only a tiny arrow tab on the edge of the monitor. The audio will continue to play. Click the tab to pull the video back into view.
PiP in Other Applications
Picture in Picture is a system-wide macOS feature, meaning it is not limited to Safari. It works natively in many other Apple applications.
If you are watching a movie in the Apple TV app, or playing a video file in QuickTime Player, simply look for the PiP icon (two overlapping rectangles with a downward arrow) in the playback controls bar. Clicking it will pop the video out into a floating window, allowing you to watch a movie while organizing your Finder files.
Stop fighting with awkward split-screen layouts. By utilizing the macOS Picture in Picture feature, you can tear videos out of your browser and float them above your workspace, drastically improving your multitasking efficiency on a single screen.