Picture in Picture on twitter website after scrolling pauses the video
I was just trying out the Picture in Picture (PiP) feature recently. It seems to work ok, however on Twitter, after setting a video on the site to PiP mode, if on the main twitter window that had the video (with the box that now says "This video is playing in Picture in Picture mode") scrolls out of view, then the PiP Video pauses. You can hit play again on the PiP window and it will continue playing, but as soon as you scroll again on the main twitter window, the PiP video will pause again.
It also seems like there are no navigation controls apart from play and pause in the PiP view - to say rewind the video or fast forward it.
All Replies (6)
Have you tried the context menu to have the "controls" for PiP? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-picture-picture-firefox#w_context-menu
As far as the pause issue at Twitter, I can't test it - I don't use Twitter.
The pause/play and move back to main window icons are there, just not controls to move forward or rewind.
If I switch to a different tab of some other website whilst in PiP mode, the twitter video keeps playing OK. I suspect this might be some optimization on twitter's part to stop playing videos that have scrolled off-screen, but with the PiP feature it might be good if they (or Mozilla) could override that to make it keep playing.
I have run into PiP video getting disabled on Jalopnik when I scroll down the page and the video isn't within the viewing area any longer. Gotta be something the web site is controlling because I don't recall that happening anywhere else. With the short time since PiP and Fx 71 have been available I imagine that this issue is widespread and "we" just haven't experienced it yet at other web sites.
Seems to be a reasonable action for the web site to take, IMO.
As far as Mozilla fixing that issue, who's to say what is right? On Jalopnik that might wreak havoc due to the tight spacing between the video's; the user could have multiple video's running simultaneously and possibly overloading Firefox processes as each new video starts running while other video's from the same source are already running.
My advice is to go to Git-Hub where a lot of Firefox development is done, along with providing "solutions" for issues (such as this) that vex Firefox users. Rather than expecting Mozilla to fix something that isn't really broken....
I know this is a new feature, I wasn't sure where to provide feedback. Completely agree that it may not be a Mozilla issue; I could imagine some content providers may also not want to allow PiP to work.
Having a look at the Mozilla Github account, there's over 2000 repositories there, I wouldn't know where to begin - I tried some searches but couldn't find anything obvious.
It seems Google also have a Picture in Picture extension, so I'm sure this isn't just a Firefox issue, but I haven't tested with Chrome.
Who knows, perhaps this is something that needs to go to the W3C...
Like Ed & yourself, I've noticed this too. But specifically on any Twitter video, not just PIP. It's a "feature" of their site. Not sure how to workaround it but I'll dig around & see.
Maybe the devs could create a way to fool Twitter into not knowing the page has been scrolled so that way it can't pause the video in PIP mode. I'll see if anyone filed that idea as a enhancement request on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org < that's what we use to file Firefox bugs. We also use Github but mostly for our mobile products as well as many other Mozilla projects.
ch.the.guru said
... Having a look at the Mozilla Github account, there's over 2000 repositories there, I wouldn't know where to begin - I tried some searches but couldn't find anything obvious. It seems Google also have a Picture in Picture extension, so I'm sure this isn't just a Firefox issue, but I haven't tested with Chrome. ...
Sorry about that. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Mozilla_on_GitHub Here's a 'complete' list of Mozilla projects @ Git-Hub. https://github.com/mozilla
It seems that the term PiP (as applied to Mozilla when searching at Git-Hub) isn't unique to the Picture in Picture feature in Firefox 71. I got all sorts of unrelated returns from a search that I just @ Git-Hub, way too many to look thru to zero in on Picture in Picture.