by Martin Brinkmann on October 01, 2018 in Music and Video – No comments
YouTube Miniplayer is a new YouTube feature on the desktop that users of the video streaming site may activate to play videos in a smaller player on the page.
Eagle-eyed YouTube users may have spotted the new Miniplayer icon when a video is played on the site. The new icon sits between the Settings icon and Default View icon in the player’s interface (which Youtube resized recently).
Hover the mouse cursor over the icon to get a tooltip and click or tap on the icon to activate the player and switch from regular view to the special view mode.
YouTube displays a smaller player in the lower right corner of the screen on activate that behaves independently from the rest of the tab.
Note that you don’t remain on the page the video is embedded on but are taken back to the previous page if there was one.
You can browse the page, e.g. a search results page and also open some pages on YouTube without losing access to the mini player.
A click on the profile icon and the selection of linked items there opens these pages while the player does its job in the lower right corner of the screen.
The same is not true, however, when you click on another video on the site as it is loaded then in regular view automatically.
You may run searches or open most pages on YouTube that are not video pages while Miniplayer plays a video. Note that the player is only visible when YouTube’s tab is active.
Just click on the video in the miniplayer interface to displays it in regular view mode on the site again.
The miniplayer interface is quite limited when you compare it to the regular interface. While you get options to play/pause, replay, and load the next video, you will notice that options to change the volume, quality, or toggle subtitles/captions are not provided. You need to go back to the regular interface to make these changes.
YouTube’s Miniplayer offers no options to resize the video or move the player from its bottom-right location to another location on the screen.
The miniplayer on YouTube works in many modern browsers. The option is not limited to Chrome but also available in Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi and Mozilla Firefox among other browsers not made by Google.
Closing Words
The Miniplayer on YouTube gives YouTube users options to play a video while they browse the site. Good news is that the player is available for most modern browsers and not just Chrome; bad news, that it is tied to the YouTube tab and rather limited when it comes to configuration options.
Opera’s Video Popout feature does this better in my opinion as it places the video player outside of the main browser UI so that it remains visible even if you switch tabs. The comparison is a bit unfair as Opera’s solution is a native browser feature while YouTube’s a feature of the page.
Chrome users can check out Sideplayer for the browser which enables a similar feature. (via Born)
Now You: Is the mini player useful?