Floating Video ♾️Mixlab

Floating Video takes the image your workflow just produced and shows it in a floating, always-on-top window in the browser instead of pinning it inside the node graph. That sounds like a small UI nicety until you see what it's for: real-time, TouchDesigner-style setups where ComfyUI is generating continuously and you want the live result floating over your other apps while you tweak. It's the display half of the pack's "real-time design" toys.

It's meant to be paired with the mixlab pack's ScreenShareNode. The classic loop: ScreenShare captures a live pixel stream from any app on your screen, an LCM-LoRA setup restyles it fast, and FloatingVideo throws the styled output back up as a floating overlay - so you're effectively running a live, AI-restyled mirror of whatever you're doing. shadowcz007 built these specifically to push ComfyUI past the batch-render mindset into something interactive, and the pack's whole "workflow-to-app" direction (the AppInfo node, the Photoshop plugin bridge) grows out of the same idea.

How it works

It's a display sink, not a processor. It takes the incoming IMAGE and renders it to a floating browser window/overlay rather than to the standard preview slot. In a continuously-running graph, that window updates as each new frame comes through, which is what gives you the "live" feel. Because it's output-only, it sits at the end of a branch.

The inputs and outputs that matter

Dead simple surface:

• image (IMAGE) in - the frame to display. That's the only input.
• No outputs. It's an output node - a terminal display, like a fancy Preview.

There's nothing to tune here; the interesting configuration lives in the nodes feeding it (the screen capture, the fast sampler) and in your browser setup.

How to install it

Via ComfyUI Manager: search comfyui-mixlab-nodes, install, restart. Or clone the pack:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/shadowcz007/comfyui-mixlab-nodes.git

then pip install -r requirements.txt (or install.bat on the Windows portable build) and restart. One pack-wide install note that bites the app/real-time features specifically: the folder must be named exactly comfyui-mixlab-nodes. If you downloaded the zip you'll have comfyui-mixlab-nodes-main, and the app-mode/floating features open blank - rename it and drop the -main.

Common issues & troubleshooting

The floating window won't open, or capture/upload fails. This is the big one, and it's called out directly in the pack's docs: the browser features here need HTTPS. The screen-share and floating-display machinery relies on browser APIs that only run in a secure context, so the guidance is to access ComfyUI over https://127.0.0.1 (or an HTTPS tunnel), not plain http://. On a LAN or cloud box, serve it over HTTPS or these nodes simply won't function.

It's laggy / stuttering in the real-time loop. FloatingVideo isn't the bottleneck - the sampler feeding it is. Real-time only feels real-time with a genuinely fast path (LCM/Turbo LoRA, low steps, small resolution). If it's chugging, cut steps and resolution until the frame rate is bearable; the display will keep up with whatever you can generate.

Blank window on a zip install. See the folder-name note above - -main on the directory breaks the app features. Rename it.

Works locally, dies on a hosted instance. Same root cause as the first item: no HTTPS, no secure-context browser APIs. Some managed/serverless ComfyUI setups also don't expose the interactive browser surface these nodes assume - this is a node built for a live local (or properly HTTPS-fronted) session, not a fire-and-forget render job.