Vynchronize – A fun realtime video sync platform for friends | Hacker News Reader

Vynchronize – A fun realtime video sync platform for friends

github.com

85 pointskyle899818 comments

I set this up in the most hacky way 10 years ago with my girlfriend. We would watch dvds together and I wanted to synchronize them (especially important for comedies)

My setup? An app that would monitor DVD Player for events while listening to events over iChat using AppleScript.

If someone paused or played the DVD, the moitoring process would notice the event, make a JSON payload representing the action including the local timestamp, and use AppleScript to post an iChat message. Then, the process on the other side, would see the special iChat message (forwarded via AppleScript), and apply the action to the local DVD player process, taking into account the difference between the sent timestamp and the local timestamp.

It worked like a charm and made watching movies so much more fun. We always had iChat open anyway so it seemed like an easy win to piggy back on that, no server needed.

An inelegant hack, but it worked.

This is pretty clever, I like it!

My cousin and I used to do this manually all the time via IM when we were younger. We watched whole shows together that way. Also we used the IM for live commentary.

  3
  2
  1
  play!
  ...
  omg, he did not just do that!
  ...
  whaaaaat?!
  ...
  pause, brb
  back, where are you?
  23:51
  okay, ready.
  3
  2
  1
  play!
  ...
  omg, i can't believe that just happened. next ep?
  yea. hold on..
  ready
  3
  2
  1
  play!

Good times.

If anyone is looking for this, but for offline videos (where every person has a local copy of the video), that exists and is called "syncplay". Very convenient when you want to watch and comment on movies with distant friends in real time.

I’ve always wished Netflix had this built in. If it didn’t support syncing between the same account it would even voluntarily cut down on account sharing.

Netflix actually had a feature on the original Xbox that allowed you to create a group with your friends and watch videos together. Unfortunately, they removed this feature a while ago.

On the Xbox 360 you mean? I recall it there, not on the original Xbox.

Yes it was on the 360. The original Xbox never got Netflix.

I've worked on this for a personal project (that never shipped), specially for music videos so the synchronization needed to be very precise. In the end, I implemented a basic NTP server via websockets to synchronize all clients on the same clock and then just send them the start timestamp of the YouTube video. I achieved sub 50ms sync 75% of the time, making it work for the last 25% was much harder than I expected.

Sort of self-hosted version of what https://rabb.it does. I have used Rabbit a couple times successfully for watching movies with Internet friends.

Rabbit allows VNC-ing into a VM instead of just synchronizing the events though - I'd be interested to see a good platform for multi-user VNC though!

Always used Garys Mod Cinema servers for this

https://github.com/hammadfauz/syncPlay

Does this work with netflix, for example?

Seems like this is for playing local files only. From what I can tell, both parties need the same file on their computer to play.

Ah, because it talks about HTML5 I figured it was used on different online sources through a browsers.

Yeah, same here built a tool for Youtube about 12 years back as an experiment using XMPP as the messaging layer for syncing and group chat.

We would buffer/pause video based on the video player state of the slowest connection, and still allow users to manually control playback.

Fun app, and a great example of the versatility of XMPP.

cytube (https://github.com/calzoneman/sync) is pretty close to this.

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