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More details: I recently left my job at Mozilla to start a company. Before I do that, I wanted to work on some fun, quicker projects. Hulu With Me lets you wat

More details: I recently left my job at Mozilla to start a company. Before I do that, I wanted to work on some fun, quicker projects. Hulu With Me lets you watch TV shows in sync with someone else. A few random notes: * I wanted this to be frictionless as possible. Click the HuluWithMe button, get a link to send to a friend, and done. Let me know if you have problems or get confused. * Debugging meant Firefox and Chrome, each running a flash video, each with an extension, and each with Firebug/Inspector open... it's amazing my computer survived. And each time I needed to test something, I had to watch commercials. So, debugging was a bit slow overall. * This uses node.js + socket.io. * Sorry non-Americans :( * If you want to test with yourself on one computer, use Chrome + Firefox (not Firefox twice, etc). * I couldn’t do Netflix for technical reasons, but would love to. If you know someone at Netflix that can help, I’d love an intro! * Work at Hulu? Say hi!

rgarcia 14y ago
How does it work with ads? For example, if I get a 30s ad and the other person gets a 60s ad, does it still sync up? I watch shows like this (on hulu, hbo go, netflix) w/ my SO fairly often and one thing I found with hulu is that oftentimes our videos get out of sync due to minor glitches here and there, e.g. we'll sync up after the end of a commercial break, but by the next commercial break we're out of sync by 5+ seconds. Just something to keep in mind...
- gkoberger 14y ago
  That was the hard part :) I keep track of where everyone is in commercials. If you finish early, the video is paused and it says you're waiting for the other person to finish. As for glitches: I experimented with a good way to fix this, but settled with just resyncing at every action (pause/play/commercial/etc). It would be annoying to have it keep syncing constantly, and a few seconds due to dropped frames isn't a huge deal.
kumar303 14y ago
Awesome work, Greg! You may be interested in following some of the WebRTC work around peer to peer connections http://www.w3.org/2011/04/webrtc-charter.html http://www.w3.org/2011/04/webrtc-charter.html It's in the distant future but they need real world cases to get the APIs right.

rgarcia 14y ago

How does it work with ads? For example, if I get a 30s ad and the other person gets a 60s ad, does it still sync up? I watch shows like this (on hulu, hbo go, netflix) w/ my SO fairly often and one thing I found with hulu is that oftentimes our videos get out of sync due to minor glitches here and there, e.g. we'll sync up after the end of a commercial break, but by the next commercial break we're out of sync by 5+ seconds. Just something to keep in mind...

gkoberger 14y ago
That was the hard part :) I keep track of where everyone is in commercials. If you finish early, the video is paused and it says you're waiting for the other person to finish. As for glitches: I experimented with a good way to fix this, but settled with just resyncing at every action (pause/play/commercial/etc). It would be annoying to have it keep syncing constantly, and a few seconds due to dropped frames isn't a huge deal.

kumar303 14y ago

Awesome work, Greg! You may be interested in following some of the WebRTC work around peer to peer connections http://www.w3.org/2011/04/webrtc-charter.html http://www.w3.org/2011/04/webrtc-charter.html It's in the distant future but they need real world cases to get the APIs right.