Show HN: rtwatch. Watch videos with friends via WebRTC, perfectly synchronized | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: rtwatch. Watch videos with friends via WebRTC, perfectly synchronized

github.com

4 pointsSean-Der8 comments

Excited to share this project I wrote! This would be the perfect way to watch a movie with someone else over a long distance. Every time you pause it stops the server sending out the latest frame.

This is fundamentally different than something like Watch2Gether where you are downloading an already existing file from a CDN. In that case you are just depending on the client side to keep things in sync, with rtwatch there is no way for users to buffer or skip ahead in the video!

Cool project! I made something very similar called cowatch.video

Also utilizes WebRTC

That is awesome. So much easier to use than rtwatch since you are doing everything client side! I really want to extend the 'co-watch' idea and make it so people can review/annotate videos could make editing a lot easier maybe.

What were the biggest hurdles you hit with implementing? Any issues with not being able to control the media pipeline in the browser?

I guess there are tradeoffs by doing it client side vs server side like your project. Like you said there's no control of the media pipeline so encoding and preprocessing the video is not possible so only video formats supported by the browser are supported.

Congrats on making something that you are able to share.

> Only the current audio/video frame is being sent to the viewers, there is no way they can download/cache the videos either for future usage.

In the end, if the video ends up at the viewer there is a way to capture it.

>If someone pauses it pauses for everyone, and no one can and no one fast forward only their video.

It doesn’t say who paused the video or give someone the ability to kick out the person who paused?

It doesn't do that currently, but I will add it to the issues! I think it is a great idea. Right now it assumes only good actors :)

Someone also asked for chat which I think could go a long way to making it more fun to use/less chance of people doing annoying things.

Not necessarily only good actors, I lived in an era where technology was more unreliable then it was today.

It’d be pretty bad if a single software bug froze everyone’s video. Please don’t assume default installation.

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