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Comment by hauxir | Hacker News Reader

Been developing this platform for over a year.

It allows you to create virtual rooms where you can chat with room members using webcam and microphone and run realtime apps that include:

- Screensharing(useful for e.g. Netflix)

- Cowatching video player

- SNES and NES Emulators

- Virtual cardtable

- Poker with Playmoney

- Quake 3 in-browser!

- Synced YouTube player

and many more coming.

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Very cool. I'd love to work with you to bring interesting apps to it.

Also, not sure if you have put much effort into trying to synch YouTube very accurately (down to the 20th of a second or better), but if that is interesting or important to you, I've done a good bit of work with dealing with the inaccuracies of YouTube's timer via the API and I'd be glad to share my code as well as ideas for this. I've found I can get it very accurate by using a bit of smoothing combined with looking at the system time. (I haven't yet done cross-internet synching and dealing with latency, but I have a plan for it)

Sounds interesting :) send me an email, it's on the page!

I'll be in touch!

How does realtime screensharing with something like Netflix work? If it's actual screensharing, wouldn't it be super laggy and low quality? Do you somehow get each user to stream the exact same Netflix URL in the sense that it's not actually screensharing but rather there are just multiple clients (which sounds like it could be a legal problem...)?

Netflix is DRM'd anyway so it's a non-starter. Try taking a screenshot of a Netflix stream. Not many people realize it'll just result in black pixels for that area.

Really? Because I just took these https://imgur.com/a/LvbVZtq

Which platform? It might also depend on the content, hmmm.

I'm not sure I should share my secrets now lol. But the answer is linux. I haven't tried screensharing before. But I have tried with other DRM stuff and it got blocked. So I wouldn't be surprised if this was a fluke. Definitely makes making memes easier though.

If the video quality is low enough then Netflix and co don't bother. It also varies on who is the content supplier, some are less fussed about protecting content that doesn't bring in much money.

I see black. Maybe the OP wasnt clear?

This is a joke btw, if you see it as anything else, go see a counsellor when this corona thing is over.

This reminds me of the old windows 98 times, where windows would just draw a blackish rectangle where the video should be and the graphics card would replace the pixels with actual video on-screen. If you hit the print button, you would just copy the windows graphic buffer with no video to be seen.

It got extra weird when you would paste the screenshot into paint with the video still playing. Suddenly you had a video playing inside paint and could even draw on it...

Aah, good old times :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_overlay

That still happens with certain hardware setups today, a similar concept to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_key

Sounds specific to windows? Definitely doesn't happen in MacOS or Linux

On Windows, I had no issue screenshotting (on Chrome) and no issue using OBS to record the screen that is displaying the Netflix content.

OpenArena! <3 It didn't work for me (something about the v6 address not resolving, and then a stream of 'connection reset by peer' msgs in the OA console; too bad it has to be in-browser and I can't just launch my native client) but I love that this is a thing, it's one of my favorite games ever.

Edit: NES games also don't work for me, I keep seeing "Load a ROM file to play a NES game!" but others in the room are playing. Firefox on Linux, this is. Can I register a ticket somewhere or are there debugging tips I could try myself?

Contact the support channel from the lobby.

I tried starting a room with the NES app and it told me to load a .nes file. However, the dialogue it launched was for photos (on my Android device). I don't think there's any way to select a .nes file from there.

I would love to know the legal implications of running a service where people are able to stream copyrighted content to others, or to share subscription services like Netflix in violation of its TOS.

This is like every other service that supports screen sharing, is it not?

Except that this service explicitly says it's for "watching movies or TV shows on Netflix together online."

justin.tv almost exclusively was for chatting/watching copyrighted videos/tv shows together online (later rebranded and sold for ~$1B as twitch.tv)

I thought services like this ran in a legal limbo because the end user can't select the content, much like radio.

Or like sitting at your friend's house while they pick some entertainment?

You mean just like email or web hosting? I can easily send you a "robbed" book in PDF format by mail. Is my MUA/MTA legally implied?

You released it at th3 right time.

I like that I don't need to register first.

I think that's a really nice concept, and quite possibly a good time to bring this to our notice whenever most of us are home bound. Do you plan on adding more features in the features?

I spend most of my free time on this. New features are added multiple times a week :)

Interesting!

I started a room, then started a video chat in it. Is there a way to do something else (e.g. play poker) without having to create a new room?

Ah to answer my own question. I wasn't logged in and created then left/rejoined and was no longer an admin.

Just what the doctor ordered, bless you sir.

Great time to launch it

Any chance synced mp4 playback is on the shortlist?

synced mp4 playback is already possible using the CoWatch app. You can sync a URL from either an htttps server or a Google Drive file.

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