Picture-in-Picture

In this guide, you’ll learn how to display floating video element of the ParticipantView component which is visible even if you minimise your browser window utilising the Picture-in-Picture API. You might want to use this customization in combination with SpeakerLayout (ParticipantViewUISpotlight property) where spotlighted ParticipantView switches between dominant speakers automatically.

Some browsers also support the more flexible Document Picture-in-Picture API.

Define custom ParticipantViewUI

The ParticipantViewUI template is incredibly versatile and can render anything you want it to. In this case, we’ll be rendering a single button which we’ll use to open the video element in the floating picture-in-picture window.

import { useEffect } from "react";
import { useParticipantViewContext } from "@stream-io/video-react-sdk";

const CustomParticipantViewUI = () => {
  const { videoElement } = useParticipantViewContext();
  const [pictureInPictureElement, setPictureInPictureElement] = useState(
    document.pictureInPictureElement,
  );

  useEffect(() => {
    if (!videoElement) return;

    // sync local state
    const handlePictureInPicture = () => {
      setPictureInPictureElement(document.pictureInPictureElement);
    };

    videoElement.addEventListener(
      "enterpictureinpicture",
      handlePictureInPicture,
    );
    videoElement.addEventListener(
      "leavepictureinpicture",
      handlePictureInPicture,
    );

    return () => {
      videoElement.removeEventListener(
        "enterpictureinpicture",
        handlePictureInPicture,
      );
      videoElement.removeEventListener(
        "leavepictureinpicture",
        handlePictureInPicture,
      );
    };
  }, [videoElement]);

  const togglePictureInPicture = () => {
    if (videoElement && pictureInPictureElement !== videoElement)
      return videoElement.requestPictureInPicture().catch(console.error);

    document.exitPictureInPicture().catch(console.error);
  };

  return (
    <>
      <button
        disabled={!document.pictureInPictureEnabled}
        style={{ position: "absolute", top: 10, right: 10 }}
        onClick={togglePictureInPicture}
      >
        {pictureInPictureElement === videoElement ? "Leave" : "Enter"}{" "}
        picture-in-picture
      </button>
      {/* your other custom UI elements */}
    </>
  );
};

Final steps

Now we can pass this custom ParticipantViewUI component down to our call layout components or directly to ParticipantView component in our custom call layout as described in the ParticipantView customizations guide.

Keyboard shortcuts

Document Picture-in-Picture