Hi Nick (@knolleary),
I had already read multiple times in the past, that the flow editor shouldn't become a dashboard (for displaying runtime state). I'm very convinced that there will be very good reasons for that decision, so I won't argument against it !!!
Although I must admit that Riku Rouvila's node-red-contrib-image-output is a very good aid for me, when I'm experimenting with video in Node-RED:
This way I can tweak my flows, and seeing the results on the video immediately. It has become my private video debugger tool... I could also display the video in other tools (like e.g. the dashboard), but this way is just much easier and quicker.
There is currently no way to expand or collapse the balloon, which could be a nice feature for people that don't want to show it all the time...
P.S. I have no commercial advantage of that contribution, I only created some pull requests to add extra features to it 
Bart
