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Comment by niek_pas | Hacker News Reader

With enough 200k/year engineers, perhaps one day Instagram will build a video player _almost_ as good as Youtube was in 2006.

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Nah, being unable to pause just means they get way more minutes of viewing when people put down their phone to do something. It just sits there and plays, earning that sweet sweet ad money.

I've always found this weird - when I put my phone down I hit the power button to turn the screen off/lock it.

This might not always stop playback, for example with YT Premium, I think it also applies to shorts, maybe only when in PiP mode? I can't recall, but I'm pretty sure, I've encountered it, somewhat inconsistently

YouTube Shorts don’t have background play/PiP, at least not through the regular Shorts player. It is possible to get a Short pulled up through the main video player because each Short actually has a page you can access by just replacing /short/ with /v/ in the URL, and that will have background play and PiP if you have these enabled.

Tapping some URLs will inconsistently get you to the page too without having to do any URL replacement. I don’t think there’s any intended logic there, just some bugs in the way URLs get handled hopping from social media app to browser to social media app since most of them try to keep you silo’d in.

I can get PiP from shorts 100% just tested it (At least in MIUI, maybe it depends on the implementation)

What you're describing is a bit different(It's probably implemented like this because old videos that weren't initially uploaded as shorts were absorbed into shorts if they fit the correct criteria)

Is MIUI Xiaomi’s fork of Android or something else? I had to look it up so I’m half guessing here, but what I wrote is for iPhones and iPads. I don’t know how different YouTube is on Android but it was my impression they kept the implementations pretty close to feature and behavioral parity, but I haven’t used an Android phone full time in almost 8 years.

Yes, Xiaomi's layer on top of Android (Wouldn't call it a fork though, that has different implications)

As far as I can tell YouTube itself tends to be pretty similar, but features come first for Android, I think PiP for shorts is out of beta in Android, but as you mentioned just getting tested on iOS

Got it. Thanks! I’ll try to keep that in mind going forward.

I think YouTube just added shorts pip on iOS as an experiment in premium.

That’s neat. Not sure it’s offered to me but I’ll look for the experiment. I like to double check software behaviors when I write comments like the one above, and I was lamenting behind the scenes that actually, I would like Shorts to have PiP. I didn’t used to want that, but PiP has grown on me.

> I like to double check software behaviors when I write comments like the one above

I commend this level of diligence! The feature is only 2 weeks old: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/new-youtube-premium-fea...

Had to manually go to the App Store and update the apps so it took some doing even after opting in but I managed to get this working on my iPhone and iPad. It's only till March 5th though, but usually the more popular experiments end up becoming features later so hopefully they cement it in! Thanks!

Even Youtube can't figure that one out

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