Google has a feature to video chat that lets you play videos from YouTube and Google Video without opening a new page.

Google System Blog notes that “if you tried the audio/video chat plug-in for Gmail and it didn’t work well, there’s a chance that the latest updates solved your issues: incompatibility with Creative camera drivers, errors when sending and receiving video for CPUs without the SSE2 extensions, lack of support for many USB cameras on a Mac OSX.”