How to Use Chrome’s Picture-in-Picture Mode to Play Local Videos
The Picture-in-Picture (PiP) extension for Google Chrome lets you watch videos on the internet in PiP mode. However, if you want to watch a video from your local drive, you can use Chrome to play it in a PiP window.
For this guide, you can use either the built-in PiP mode or the official Chrome extension. If you haven’t already, head over to the Chrome web store and install the PiP extension to continue.
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Note: Not all video file formats are supported for playback in Google Chrome. However, Chrome supports WebM and MP4 formats natively, though some MP4 files may fail to open due to different types of codecs.
For this guide, we’ll be using Windows as the operating system. The process should work identically on all desktop platforms including macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS.
For Google’s PiP extension to work with files stored locally on your computer, you have to grant permission to the extension to access a file’s URL. Right-click the extension’s icon located in the toolbar and then select “Manage Extensions.”
Scroll down until you see “Allow Access to File URLs” and toggle the switch to the “On” position.