How to enable picture-in-picture for YouTube on your Mac

If you like to work with a music video playing in the background or watch your favorite sports team while perusing social media or maybe if you simply like doing two things at once, picture-in-picture (PiP) can be really useful. It lets you pin a small window showing a video within a larger window on your computer or TV screen.

If you’re using a Mac, you can easily set up PiP for a YouTube video using either Apple’s Safari or Google’s Chrome browsers as well.

There are a couple of other ways you can start PiP. 

After this article was published, a reader wrote me and asked why I hadn’t also included the way to do PiP using Google’s Chrome browser on a Mac. So I did a bit of research and found that you can have PiP on your Mac using Chrome — and it works almost exactly the same way that Safari does, except you can either use the built-in method (courtesy How-To Geek) or a Google PiP extension.

Right-click twice in the YouTube video to get the Picture in Picture menu selection.

Again, as with Safari, the PiP functionality is pretty basic; you can move the video anywhere around the screen, pause it, and return it to its YouTube window. However, don’t expect to get any captions with it; the captions will continue to run on the original YouTube page.

There is no perceivable advantage to using the extension over the built-in right-click feature; both give you the same simple (but effective) PiP feature.

You can move the PiP image anywhere in your screen; however, captions won’t move with it.

That’s it! Enjoy your video.

Update June 23rd, 2020, 10:08AM ET: This article was originally published on December 27th, 2019, and it has been updated to include instructions on PIP in Chrome.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEr5yrn5VjsLC5jmtnanFfZn9wfpZoaWpoY26BdYOOqaCpZaCesLXB0Z5koqZdpbakwNSrnGalkZh6tK3FmqmiZamkwrXBwZ5kr6GUmrxutM6wZK2nXayuta%2FH