This Steam Deck guide covers Couch PiP, a new Decky Loader plugin that gives you picture-in-picture on your Steam Deck or Steam Machine. You can watch YouTube, Twitch, Netflix or almost any website in a small window while you game, and it’s something I’ve been waiting a long time for. Earlier plugins have done this before, but I think this one does it really well.
What Couch PiP does
Couch PiP puts a video window on top of whatever you’re playing in Game Mode, and your controller keeps working in the game. It’s made by CaraJean206 on GitHub and started as a fork of the original Picture in Picture plugin by Ross Squires. The developer built it for playing on a TV with a Steam Machine, but it works on the Steam Deck too.
From the plugin’s panel you can pick a source such as Netflix, YouTube, Twitch or Disney+, or type in any web address. Once a video is playing, you get controls to pause, rewind, skip forward, make the window bigger or smaller, and turn the volume up or down. When you’re done, just hit Close.
Picture-in-picture position and size options
There’s a lot of customisation here. You can blow the video up so it takes up the whole screen, or shrink it down so it pops into a side menu. You can also move it around: the middle of the screen, the top right, the bottom left, or wherever you’re comfortable. It can hug a corner or sit freely wherever you put it.
According to the GitHub page, there are nine preset positions (the corners, the middle of each side and the centre), sliders that reach every edge of the screen, and a size slider from 10% to 80% of the screen. It’s designed to work at 1080p, 1440p and 4K.
Does it affect game performance?
I tested it running Cyberpunk 2077 with an NFL game playing in the top-right corner. I didn’t get any FPS dips or hiccups, and the game held a solid 60fps the whole time with the video running. If you want to see how Cyberpunk itself performs on Valve’s console, I’ve covered it in my Cyberpunk 2077 Steam Machine performance tests.
Steam Deck guide: how to install Couch PiP
Couch PiP isn’t in the Decky plugin store, because the store doesn’t accept AI-written code and the developer wrote this plugin with an AI assistant. That means you install it through Decky’s developer mode instead. It only takes a few minutes:
- Make sure Decky Loader is installed.
- If you already have the original Picture in Picture plugin installed, uninstall it first.
- Switch to Desktop Mode, open the Couch PiP GitHub page and copy the install link:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CaraJean206/couch-pip/main/couch-pip.zip - Still in Desktop Mode, open Steam in Big Picture mode. This is what lets you paste the link in the next steps.
- Press the three-dot button to open the Quick Access Menu and go to the Decky tab.
- Open Decky’s settings, go to General, scroll all the way down and make sure Developer mode is turned on.
- Go to the Developer tab, choose Install plugin from URL, paste the link and confirm the install.
Once it’s installed, Couch PiP shows up in your Decky plugin list. Open it and customise it to your liking. If you’ve followed my DeckyMultiFrameGen install guide, it’s the same Developer mode process.
Using Couch PiP
Open the Quick Access Menu, go to the Decky tab and choose Couch PiP. From there:
- Choose what to watch picks a site, and you can save your own bookmarks, such as a Jellyfin or Plex server on your home network.
- Control page with controller opens a remote, so you can move around a website with the D-pad, sign in, search and type with the on-screen keyboard.
- The Picture section sets the position, size and spacing from the edges.
When you close the Quick Access Menu, the video stays on top of your game and the controller goes back to the game. The plugin also checks its GitHub page for new versions, so updates show up as a notification with an Update button at the top of its panel.
Good to know
- Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video need DRM support in Steam’s built-in browser, so the developer warns they may not play, or may play at lower quality.
- It relies on undocumented parts of the Steam client, so a Steam update could break it.
- It runs as your normal user without root access and is open source under the BSD 3-Clause licence. At the time of writing, the latest version is 0.4.6.
Final thoughts
Couch PiP is a plugin I’m loving. It’s simple to set up, it has lots of options, and it didn’t hurt performance even in a demanding game like Cyberpunk 2077. If you want to catch a stream or a match while you play on your Steam Deck or Steam Machine, it’s well worth installing, and a big thanks to CaraJean206 for making it. If you like useful plugins, my SCopy guide shows you how to copy your clips and screenshots to any browser.
