These are a few of the reasons I've continued to use the "Open With" extension with mpv. ([right-click]->Open With->mpv) This provides full playback control, lets me toggle stay-on-top, etc. Firefox's PiP is a nice thought but just isn't right for me as currently implemented.

Sorry, which extension is this? The only one I was able to find named "Open With" is pretty clearly not what you were referring to.

I prefer this one as it is potentially more secure than some of the other ones

https://github.com/grmat/play-with

This is the one I currently use: https://github.com/darktrojan/openwith Perhaps play-with is a better choice.

MPV is a player. https://mpv.io/

Oh, I know all about MPV. Invoking it cleanly from within Firefox is the part I was asking about (and which has been answered :)

That's what I do as well, and it's fantastic. Bonus functionality: Get MPV to always open on the second screen fullscreen (if you have one) and have it be always-on-top, small and on the bottom right corner when non-fullscreen, so you can just press Esc on the full-screen mpv window and get a PiP-like window.

samesame

also;

* rank up the cache settings in mpv to prebuffer the whole vid

* see the ytdl-format setting in mpv.conf to select a codec that your machine can decode in hardware for enhanced power efficiancy (lower fanspeed)

if you like vim like keybindings courtesy of tridactyl

bind V hint -W ! mpv to show a letter or letters adjacent to all links and open the one chosen in mpv. Normally most pages have few enough links visible that hints are either 1 or 2 characters. This means instead of picking up the mouse you can hit 3 keys.

You can get most pages down to 1 character if you craft your own custom selector, e.g. https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/dc8919e7e65d5dfa...

For the record we don't recommend piping straight to `!` as a malicious (and fairly Tridactyl specific) site could use it to execute whatever it wanted. We have a default bind for open in mpv that sanitises things - https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/dc8919e7e65d5dfa... using https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/dc8919e7e65d5dfa...

Thanks. A question occurs to me shouldn't such sanitation be its own step in order to be generalized to anything that the user wants to run?

if it's not always on top, why break it out of the browser window at all? maybe i just haven't used it enough for your request to become apparent to me, but it seems counter intuitive on first thought.

I really like Firefox PIP, but it's not perfect yet. I have missed the "timeline" so it would be easy to jump back if I wanted to re-watch the last bit. But I have noticed now that if the PIP window is active the arrow keys works for that which is great and it's also possible change volume with up/down arrow. So what a most miss now is that the PIP window remember its size and position from last time. Right now (on youtube) different resolutions gives different window sizes.

I wish I could get subtitle support on Netflix. Their app doesn't allow you to resize when its as always on top. PiP allows me to position it where and how I want, but lacks subtitles :(

IIRC there was a firefox extention that popped out anything into a browser window with a simple header. You'd have a quarter inch of header, but it would be like a poor mans PiP and you'd end up with more controls at your disposal than the native firefox solution.