Watching live TV on a second monitor while you work

A channel on the second screen while you work is one of the two things a desktop does that a television cannot. There are 2 ways to arrange it, and they suit different desks.

Picture-in-picture, or a second window#

Ctrl+P opens picture-in-picture. It is a real second window rather than an overlay painted on the first: the video surface is migrated across, which is more work than it sounds and is the reason it keeps playing while you drag it between displays.

Use it when the channel is genuinely secondary. Small, always on top, out of the way in a corner.

Ctrl+P   picture-in-picture, a second window that follows you between displays
F        fullscreen on whichever display the window is on
M        mute, but only while the player owns fullscreen on live TV

The alternative is to put the main window on the second monitor and leave it there. Use that when the second screen is a television or a spare panel with nothing else on it, because a full window gives you the channel list, the guide and the transport controls without a trip back.

One behaviour here catches people, and it is deliberate. The transport shortcuts do not act on live TV unless the player owns fullscreen. So a channel running in a background window will not respond to M or the space bar while you are typing in another application. That is the correct answer: your keystrokes belong to the thing you are looking at.

The mixed-monitor detail#

This one accounts for a picture that otherwise makes no sense.

HDR is decided per window and per monitor, not once for the application. The app looks up which display the window is actually on and reads that display's colour space before deciding whether to ask for a 10-bit surface. It is done that way precisely because of the two-screen desk: an HDR monitor next to an SDR one should not cause the SDR one to inherit HDR handling.

So dragging the player from an HDR panel to an SDR panel changes what it asks for. That is right, not a glitch.

We got this wrong the first time, in a way that only shows up in a running app. The first implementation asked for 10 bits unconditionally, on the reasoning that it costs the same 4 bytes per pixel. No test caught the problem: a 10-bit swapchain changes how the compositor treats the video plane, the translucent player chrome composited lighter, and the transport controls started ghosting through the video underneath. Auto now asks for 10 bits only where the display reports HDR, and any probe failure answers SDR, because SDR is the answer that cannot regress anything.

If you force HDR to Always on an SDR panel, the output goes PQ and looks washed out. That escape hatch exists for displays that under-report, not as a quality setting.

Making a background channel cheap#

Three things help, and none of them is obvious.

Mute it. Not for politeness: the audio path is what pins a device and, with passthrough on, opens it in exclusive mode.

Consider a multiview tile instead of the full player. A muted tile is capped at 640 by 360 and runs 350 and 200 milliseconds of buffer against the live path's 1200 and 800. Lower resolution, smaller buffers, less work, and for a channel in the corner of a second screen you will not see the difference. Multiview covers the layouts.

Set the sleep timer if this is an evening habit. Off, 15, 30, 60 or 90 minutes with a countdown. It is session state and never persisted, so it cannot survive a restart and stop a stream nobody armed. On live it clears playback when it expires, because there is no position worth keeping and the provider connection should not run all night. On a film it pauses instead and keeps your place.

What this costs your provider line#

Every stream is a connection. A channel on the second monitor while somebody else watches in the living room is 2 connections, and most lines allow 1 or 2. This is the most common cause of "it worked this morning and now it does not". Max connections covers the counting, including why a connection can stay spent after you have stopped watching.

For the full key map, including which keys are on-demand only, keyboard shortcuts worth knowing.