SiliconDust has been at the forefront of home theater PC technology for years, and in the last few years, their products have also spread to support mobile platforms. One of the things we love most about the HDHomeRun platform is that we can seamlessly transition from watching on a TV to a PC, tablet, or phone. Our phones and tablets tend to be devices that we use for multiple purposes at the same time. That’s become so evident that Android Oreo now supports the ability for video applications to run in a picture-in-picture (PIP) mode. The latest release of the HDHomeRun app on Android now supports PIP, and we love it!
Android Oreo is a brand new version of the mobile operating system. While it’s certainly not on every device, it’s on many of the popular ones, like the Google Pixel phones. With Oreo you can now keep a video playing in a small window while checking your Twitter timeline, following the score of a game you’re watching, or getting the latest news from Reddit. Unfortunately, there aren’t many video apps that support PIP yet. Even Google’s own YouTube app requires a subscription to use this new feature. SiliconDust jumped on it right away though.
Watching the HDHomeRun app in picture-in-picture mode is simple to do. If you have a device with Android Oreo on it you’ll see a new button in the app that looks like two squares with one overlaid over the other. When that is tapped the window will shrink down to about 40% the width of the screen.
The HDHomeRun picture-in-picture window will always display on top of any other apps that are currently running. While it defaults to the lower right corner it can be moved by simply dragging it to another area on the screen. When done multitasking, tap the window and there will be a button in the window to resume full-screen playback.
We love the new picture-in-picture feature in Android Oreo, and we’re excited to have the functionality in one of our most-used video applications. SiliconDust did a great job implementing the feature and getting it out so shortly after the release of Oreo. Let us know in the comments below what you think of the feature, and if there are things you’d like to see changed about it.
Download HDHomeRun from Google Play
