A fried said on Twitter yesterday that he couldn’t figure out how to get a video to play in its own window from iTunes. He was playing a video and wanted to do something in another part of iTunes, and couldn’t find out how to do it.
Video controls, in iTunes, are poorly designed. They’re hidden in contextual menus (though the main setting used to be in the preferences). And the friend in question, while he is quite technically adept, simply didn’t think of right-clicking.
First, if your video is playing full-screen, and you want to move it to its own window, right-click on it and you’ll see this menu:
As you can see, you can just choose Play Video in Separate Window, or Play Video in iTunes Window. In the latter case, the video shows up in iTunes, but the iTunes toolbar is still visible.
If you’re playing a video in a separate window and you want to change where it’s playing, right-click and you’ll see this menu:
As you can see, it offers options to switch to the iTunes window, or full screen, but also lets you adjust the size of the standalone window. (Which you can also do by dragging one of its corners.)
So, these options are well-hidden, but if you need them, just right-click.
(Serious bonus points to anyone who can guess what the videos are that I used for my screenshots. They are music videos, but very, very obscure ones…)