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I developed a web app that allowed my friends and me to watch the same video synchronously during the lock-downs / curfew after Summer 2020. The video would be
by jraph 4y ago
I developed a web app that allowed my friends and me to watch the same video synchronously during the lock-downs / curfew after Summer 2020. The video would be served by my server, and anybody could control the playback. Pausing or seeking would do it for everyone. We would all connect to a Jitsi Meet room so we could hear people laugh or react to the video.
I called this "Meet Anyway", it was my first Svelte app, and never released it for several reasons, among them:
- I had to do some manual video upload and provide the exact video URL to the app to make things work
- the thing had some glitches even if it mostly worked and did the job
- I had other things to do, in particular taking care of an open source network implementation of a popular letter-based game that I started in 2016 and then forgot (ran all this time on my server without maintenance at all, not appearing in top) and which suddenly attracted people during the lock-down.
- and now I'm interested in other things, especially that the lock-downs are over. It would be nice to finish it and publish it though, but I'm more interested in the other things, and there are major issues: the videos need to live under the same domain as the app if I remember correctly because of browser security, so either people have to host the tool themselves or we would need to offer a service that would host people's videos while they are watching it, or at least to proxy them. I did not want to set up such a service and so the tool does not solve the issue for many people, only those who are technically inclined.
This was my second shot at this issue, I had first put together a Python program which allowed two users to watch the same video locally with a regular Linux video player, so I could watch stuff with a relative, using MPRIS, a unified Linux / Free Desktop D-Bus interface to control music and video players. This one I actually released it, but there's actually a mature project that does this better, is actually maintained and is cross-platform: https://syncplay.pl/ https://syncplay.pl/