REVISED: PiP improvement requests

Brave Feature Requests
1

Apparently I’m senile and can’t figure out computers anymore. In light of discovering how to use Brave’s built in Picture in Picture feature in my last thread, here are a few quality of life improvements that would bring it up to par with Firefox’s PiP system:

  1. Ability to force-enable even on videos that have the “disable PiP” flag (such as ESPN+ live events)
  2. Multiple simultaneous PiPs
  3. Remember the PiP window size and position permanently—it’s always resetting to small and bottom right

Edited to specify which ESPN videos are blocked, as homepage/non-subscription videos can be PiP’d

2

@DarthZiplock can you be more specific on this? Like is it anywhere on ESPN or what types of things? The reason I’m asking is I just went to ESPN and it seems to work. But because I don’t have any active subscription, I can’t get to live content. I’m not sure if this is where you’re saying you might be having issues?

But definitely would be helpful to get more specifics on this.

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3

It’s ESPN+ videos where they’ve blocked PiP, particularly live events. I would imagine Disney+ shows and many other subscription sites are the same.

(I’ve never watched anything as a non-subscriber, it’s all NHL live streams for me)

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4

If so, I’m not encountering on Disney Plus. But I did encounter when testing on Hulu.

Disney Plus:

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But then on Hulu, I see it:

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So on testing with Firefox then, I see what you mean about how you can make it work anyway.

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5

@Mattches @steeven anyone we can ping to find out if this can be done? At least the Picture-in-picture aspect on some of these sites like Hulu. It’s interesting to see Firefox is able but not Brave.

The rest of the requests are fun as well. But I guess #1 if nothing else seems like a pretty valid one.

6

I hadn’t tested on Disney Plus specifically either, just taking a guess since they’re all in the same family. But yeah, Hulu does exhibit exactly what I’m encountering on ESPN+ here.

Agreed that point #1 would be the top priority.

Brave kicks the trash out of Firefox for me in every aspect except that one.

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7

@DarthZiplock hmm, I didn’t think well enough. So the picture-in-picture seems like it might actually be inherited from Chromium. I say that because similar thing is in Chrome, which I didn’t think to look at.

Where this matters is that Brave tends to have limited resources to work on things. While there’s always a chance for this to be handled by Brave, I’m going to bet that this will be one of the things that might be better requested upstream by people working on Chromium since they have a lot more people able to work on it.

But have tagged in Mattches and all just in case they can get people to look into it. Especially if this might be something that they can resolve through Shields or something.

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8

Interesting. Now I don’t know jack crap about how software and stuff works, but I’ve seen Chrome extensions that supposedly just ignore the video site’s “disable PiP” flag.

I haven’t gotten any of them to work, but it sounds simple enough to me? Maybe?

9

Looks like @Mattches kind of answered someone else on this before as well:

I just pinged one of the people in the Github he linked to see if should create a separate topic or what they might be able to tell us.

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10

@DarthZiplock someone did reply with some info to test. Seems to partially work. If you go to Settings → Shields → Content Filtering then you can put in your own rules under Create custom filters

So like on Hulu, it’s:

hulu.com##video:remove-attr(disablePictureInPicture)

This adds Picture-In-Picture options but no controls on it. So it’s a half victory but better than nothing:

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So once that’s done, the video from Hulu plays in PIP but I don’t have a timestamp or any way to pause, rewind, etc.

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11

@fanboynz or @shivan do you know if is anything that can be done? Whether it be a filter type in Shields, a toggle in the browser, or some native code so it just works by default?

While Picture-In-Picture works for most content, it seems it’s just some specific ones like Hulu and ESPN+.

On DisneyPlus it seems to allow PIP but without controls, much the same as what Hulu did once a person added the hulu.com##video:remove-attr(disablePictureInPicture) filter rule. But shows by default without any special filters.