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Co-watching is an interesting space. One I've worked in actually. And yes, I agree it's not "solved". Amazon has taken a stab at this with a watch party on Twi
by cletus 5y ago
Co-watching is an interesting space. One I've worked in actually. And yes, I agree it's not "solved".
Amazon has taken a stab at this with a watch party on Twitch. I imagine you could have a private stream and do it that way maybe? Not ideal of course. It's intended for a different use case.
The best options I've seen involve using sites of questionable legality plus Discord.
Your observations of skew are kind of interesting and larger than I would've expected. But I guess this is the video players being built to show you the content not showing you the content at the same time as someone else. Specifically this means no effort is made to "catch up" in case of buffering. You or your GF must have a lot of buffering. This alone surprises me because Netflix's core delivery tech seems to be extremely good. But again, their delivery tech probably isn't built to solve this problem.
Anyway, while that's an unsolved problem it's not core to Netflix's business and that's the key criteria here.
- maerF0x0 5y agoOn different hardware how do they synchronize the playback speed? Each device has very different processing environment, so I cant imagine it would be easy to ensure that exact of playback speed. eg maybe one is playing 30 frames per second, and the other is playing 29.85 ...
- snovv_crash 5y agoDouble or drop the occasional frame I guess? Audio is easier to stretch because it is stored as frequency components already.
- ComputerGuru 5y agoAudio is easier to stretch but audio should also never be stretched because we are extremely perceptive to it in a way that we aren’t with our visual processing abilities. Video should always be kept in sync with audio and not the other way around. You can freely drop or repeat video frames (within the boundaries of reason) without anyone being able to detect it in a blind test, but audio should not be messed with. This is why when syncing audio and video from different sources during production, the master clock is always the audio.
- snovv_crash 5y agoVideo conferencing already does massive audio compression (>2x speedup) to compensate for temporarily dropped connections. 30.5s of audio delivered over 30s isn't noticeable if you keep the frequencies the same, which is more than adequate for multiple people watching a movie together.