How to use Picture in Picture for YouTube on iPhone iOS 15

• Steps to use Picture in Picture on YouTube for iOS
• You can use this Picture in Picture mode on iPhone and iPad and watch YouTube in mini screen.
• Also, I’ve given steps to enable the default picture in picture for iPhone.
• You can also watch movies in PIP mode on Apple TV App.

Picture in Picture is a feature that has been around in Android phones for a long time and Apple has finally caught up to it recently. If you are not aware of Picture in Picture (PiP), it’s a great feature that lets you multitask even while watching a video. How great is that? Now, let’s see how it works and how you can use it and How to watch Videos in Picture-in-picture mode on YouTube iOS.

What is Picture in Picture?

Let’s say you are watching a video on your iPhone. You get a message or an email that you need to deal with right away. Normally, what you have to do is, pause the video, go to the email app or tap on the Notification and then once you’ve dealt with that, you can come back to the video you were watching and then press play again.

Obviously, this is a bummer because it stops to flow of entertainment, and also you might even lose interest in watching the video after that.

Now, PiP is the solution to that. So, if you use PiP, what happens is, The video shrinks into a floating window on the Home screen and you can continue to deal with the email or message while the video is still playing. Even if you open an app or do anything for that matter, the video thumbnail stays over and it keeps playing.

You could go back to the full-screen window anytime you want and also this floating thumbnail window has some controls to deal with the video as well.

How to check if your video app supports PiP

Now, the Picture in Picture is not supported by all the apps right when the feature is announced. It requires the software developers of the apps to make some changes to the app code so that you could enable PiP mode.

So, if you want to know if an app you have used for viewing videos supports Picture in Picture, you can do that by start watching the video and then make sure it’s on Fullscreen. Once it’s playing in full screen, swipe up from the bottom of the screen just like how you would do to exit the app and reach the Home screen.

If the app supports Picture in Picture, then the video would be playing in a small floating window instead of pausing and stopping.

Enable Picture in Picture in Settings

To use this feature in iOS we need to make sure that it’s enabled in the Settings. Follow the steps below to do that. This feature works without the swipe-up feature in case if you don’t make this change in the Settings app as mentioned below here. You have to enable this first to your the Picture-in-Picture mode on YouTube.

1. First things first, we need to make sure that the PiP feature is enabled in the Settings app. Go to the Settings app.
2. Choose General from the list.
3. Under General, Choose Picture in Picture.
4. Under that, please ensure that the Start PiP automatically option is enabled. As mentioned here, when you swipe up to go to Home or use other apps, video and FaceTime calls will automatically continue in Picture in Picture mode.

How to use Picture in Picture on YouTube App on iPhone iOS 15

YouTube just added “Picture-in-Picture on iOS” to its try a new feature on the iOS YouTube app, To Enable Picture in Picture on iOS 15 please follow the below steps.

1. Open YouTube App and Go to profile
2. Click on Settings.
3. Click on “Try New Features“
4. Find “Picture-in-picture on iOS“
5. Click “Turn ON”
6. Restart YouTube App
7. Open any video, Maximize by clicking on the box icon at the bottom right.
8. Now, Swipe up to see Pip mode on YouTube.

How to use Picture in Picture on Apple TV App

There are two ways to use Picture in Picture in iOS. One way is to swipe up to exit the video app and then seeing if it goes to the floating window.

Another way is to use the PiP button. Let’s see how you can do that here. Assuming you have iOS 14 or later, I’m going to show you how to do that using the Apple TV app.

1. Open the Apple TV app.
2. Start Watching any video that you would like to watch. I’m choosing this episode for that as you can see in the screenshot below.
3. Once you are the video player mode, tap on the PiP button at the top left section as pointed out in the screenshot below.
4. Now the video goes to the PiP mode as you can see.
5. You could tap on the Full screen button in the floating window to go back to the Full Screen mode as pointed in the screenshot above. You could also shrink it to whateve size you want and its resizable anytime.

That’s how you can use the Picture in Picture feature works in iOS 15. We can expect to see some updates for this feature in the future if Apple thinks about bringing split windows in the iPhone. I personally think its a good idea and let’s see if it ever comes to life.