The problem with watching videos in your browser is that it prevents you from multi-tasking, i.e. do other work while watching the video. You often have to remain in the current tab and finish watching the video before you can resume your work in another browser tab. While you can pull out the tab to load in a new window, it is a troublesome process and the video always don’t scale well. What if you can easily pop out videos to windows of their own so you can watch it and do other things at the same time? Wouldn’t that be great?
PopVideo is a simple extension for Firefox that does one thing and did it well – it pops out video to a new resizeable window so you can keep it in sight while working on other stuff.
The usage is very simple. After you have installed it, when you hover your mouse over any video, you will see a blue video icon at the top right corner of the video.
Simply click on this icon and the video will pop out onto its own window. As you resize the window, the video will resize itself too, so you can adjust it to the perfect width that does not distract you from your work.
Once you have popped out the video, the original video will be replaced with a placeholder image. When you click on this placeholder image, the popped out window will close and the video will be restored to the original window/tab. One thing though, it doesn’t resume the video to where you stopped previously on the popped out window.
For the PopVideo configuration option, you can get it to save the number of play history and whether there should only be one popup window at any time. You can also get it to close the original tab when the video is popped out.
The good thing about PopVideo is that it supports Adblock Plus and FlashBlock too. So if you have those extensions installed, you can watch your popped out videos without ads and save time, bandwidth and frustration.
I have tried PopVideo on various video sites, such as Youtube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Youku.com, Tudou and videos that are embedded on sites. They all worked perfectly. As long as it can detect a video element on the page, it will be able to pop it out.
PopVideo is a useful extension for regular video watchers. If you are learning from online courses, this extension will be great as it allows you to watch the video and apply what you learnt at the same time. I am sure there are tons of ways to make good use of this extension. Try it out and let us know if it works for you.
PopVideo
