Picture-in-Picture keeps zooming in on and cutting off parts of videos
So, I've been using the Picture-in-Picture feature of Firefox a lot - when it works well, it's a really useful feature, especially if, like me, you use a second screen to play the video on, but don't like the overlay constantly popping up over the video. And, when the video is in a modern, widescreen aspect ratio, it usually works.
The problem is that when I try to watch, in fullscreen, a video that's in a 4:3 ratio, as many are on Netflix, Amazon and the like, the Picture-in-Picture window will often, presumably registering the black space on either side, zoom right into the video, cutting off a massive portion of the frame and filling the screen completely. Sometimes it doesn't do that at all, sometime it can be fixed by restarting the video and fiddling with the timings and sometimes there's just seemingly nothing I can do and it just will not stop doing it, no matter how much I reload or what I do!
Please tell me how I can get the damn thing to just keep the video in place and stop it deciding "Hey! You don't need to see all of the video, do you?! No, of course you don't!"
All Replies (3)
Why use PiP to watch a video in Full Screen mode why you usually have a full screen button on the player that sould work without such problems ?
PiP mode is meant to be used to have a small player on the screen that is always visible (on top), so can watch the video with other applications open.
For the record, two reasons - firstly, because I dislike having an overlay on the video that pops up and distracts me (and, in the case of many youtube videos, sometimes makes it impossible to read any text in that part of the screen) and secondly, because my second screen is set up at more of an angle that the first, so I can watch it out of the corner of my eye while focusing on the main screen without having part of that screen obscured. Also, there are some, though few, players that don't have such a button, so it comes in handy then too.
Now, I realize that's an odd setup, even though it's the best for me. However, to be honest, the question of "why" seems irrelevant to me. If you're not supposed to use PIP in full-screen mode, then why does it have a full-screen function in the first place? The problem isn't that I'm trying to wrangle the player to do something it wasn't designed to do. The problem is that I'm doing something it's clearly designed to do and it doesn't work properly.
Sorry if that was confrontational, but I'm looking to solve a problem with a Firefox feature, not be told I should be using something completely different instead. If that were what I wanted, believe me I'd use it, but as it isn't, I'd rather solve the actual problem I have.
Yes, I was already suspecting that you were using multiple monitors as that is the most likely use case for using full screen.
PiP works best if you resize the player window (drag the corners) to fill the screen as this keeps the aspect ratio, but this gives black areas. If you use full screen mode then you fill the entire screen and you either lose the aspect ration or you lose content depending on what wins (width or height). I don't know what happens with videos that have various forms of dimensions and you force a PiP window to full screen mode to fit on a 16:9 or 16:10 monitor.