Facebook Videos will now play audio by default, support picture-in-picture mode and more

Unless you’ve been religiously avoiding any Facebook-related news since the past few months, you’ll be very much aware of the fact that company CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees video as the next big thing for Facebook.

To that end, Facebook has announced a slew of updates to its video platform, mostly for the better, but it’s not all good news.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. Facebook will now start auto-playing videos with sound. Earlier, videos would still load in the background but you had to tap on them for audio playback. This was comfortable and less intrusive.

As with everything Facebook does, however, this new auto-playing of sound will be enabled by default, whether you asked for it or not.

While we haven’t tested it out for ourselves, we will say that Facebook has attempted to implement the feature in a more thoughtful way.

The sound is designed to fade in and out as you scroll through the News Feed. You have the option to disable the automatic playback of audio entirely if you don’t want it and better still, the videos will not play with audio if your phone is set to silent mode.

Facebook says that the feature has received positive feedback from its testers.

Speaking of scrolling, a newly introduced picture-in-picture (PIP) mode will continue to play the video in a tiny window while you browse. On Android, this PIP window will even persist on your Android Home Screen when you exit the app.

Another nice touch is vertical video. Finally, vertical videos will play in full-screen in portrait mode.