Windows 10 introduced a mini view in the Creators Update. At present, this mini view works in the Movies & TV app, and in the Groove app. The mini view lets you switch to a smaller player in both these apps. This player is then pinned to the top of your screen. You can watch a movie or listen to a song. Mini view isn’t a restricted to just Microsoft’s own apps. Any developer can add support for it if they want to. Users would no doubt love the feature in apps like Netflix but it hasn’t been added. Compact View is a free Windows app that fills this requirement. It lets you watch YouTube, Hulu, and Neflix in mini view.
Compact View is basically a web wrapper app that supports the mini view. You have to visit the website you want to watch inside this app, and play a video. You can then switch to the mini view.
Watch Netflix In Mini View
Open Compact view. By default, it take you to Netflix. Sign in with your account and select something to watch. Click the compact view button in the title bar to switch to the mini view.
The app will switch to the mini view. You can control playback and move the mini player around like you can with the Movies & TV and Groove app.
Watch YouTube And Hulu In Mini View
To watch YouTube and Hulu, or any other website in mini view, you will need to add it. The process is simple but the UI isn’t very intuitive. To visit a different website, click the URL bar at the top. Enter the URL for a video you want to watch or just visit YouTube, or Hulu. Play a video in full screen and then switch to the mini view.
Compact View will switch to the mini view.
Limitations
Compact View is a nice app in concept. It fulfills a genuine need and the developer has added a few well-thought out features like a dark theme you can switch to from the app’s settings. Unfortunately, while the app’s core feature works flawlessly, it has its bugs. The developer has added support for multiple website containers. You can add them all separately so that you don’t have to type the URL every time you want to watch on a different website. Unfortunately, this feature doesn’t work. You can add multiple websites but you can’t switch to them. You’re basically stuck entering the URL again and again. The settings panel is also a bit buggy to open/close.
Compact View as mentioned earlier is a web wrapper. It’s a kind of browser that can switch to the mini view so you can expect to see a few UI problems when you visit a website e.g., UI elements might overlap each other or render incorrectly. Mini View is a Windows 10 Creators Update feature so the app will not work on older versions of Windows.