Today, there are already a lot of media applications that support picture-in-picture on Apple’s iPad. But YouTube is just one that refuses that, while it works on Android. Would you like to watch YouTube videos while doing something else on your iPad, then there is a detour for it. In this article we explain how this works exactly.
Let’s say we’re aware of the fact that YouTube supports Split View on the iPad. However, that is not ideal. The app then still takes up half of the screen and that is not always useful.
The solution we offer here does require that you have at least iPadOS 13 on your iPad. If so, you can use the new desktop mode of the Safari browser. Apple’s browser has its own video player. And you could use that video player as a replacement for the picture-in-picture mode that shines in absence.
Picture-in-picture for YouTube on the iPad
You must do the following. First open the Safari app on your iPad. Then you go to the YouTube website. You can log in here with your Google account if you want to access your subscriptions, but of course that is not mandatory. If you are familiar with the interface of the YouTube website, you will immediately feel at home here – even on your iPad.
Now find a video you want to watch. Open the video and let it start playing. Then tap the button for full screen view at the bottom right of the video screen. Now that the YouTube website has taken over your entire iPad screen, you can tap the Picture-in-Picture button at the top left. That’s the two screen button and a small arrow pointing to a white screen.
The video is then immediately displayed in a floating screen at the bottom right of the screen. You can now adjust the location of the player by dragging it on your screen. And if you squeeze you can also adjust the size of the floating screen. Do you want the image to return to normal? Then you can stop the video or press the picture-in-picture button again. Then the screen returns to what it was before and you can continue with what you were doing. It is not an ideal situation, but it is fine to work with it in this way.
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