SyncPlay: Synchronize VLC with remote friends to watch together | Hacker News Reader

SyncPlay: Synchronize VLC with remote friends to watch together

syncplay.pl

141 pointsteruakohatu15 comments

A friend of mine and I get together to watch movies but with lockdown we have started using syncplay with great success. I use it with the mpv media player and he uses VLC.

If you have Plex running check out SyncLounge too: http://synclounge.tv/

was just thinking of curling up on the couch and watching Big Buck Bunny with 18 remote friends

Is that porn?

Depends on what you are after, but it's the demo movie that VLC and other media players use as it's available under an open license.

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

https://peach.blender.org/download/

Reading the Wikipedia just now taught me that Big Buck Bunny has audio!

BBB is often played on a loop while setting up large (particularly high-res) video systems, independent of the sound systems. I've seen the video hundreds, if not thousands or times but don't think I've ever heard the audio.

It's the lorem ipsum of video.

I wonder if Netflix or HBO can do that? Seems so obvious...

Cool, never heard of it! I made something similar, but web based with youtube-dl for parsing. It's not ideal, but I also used it to watch movies together with friends during the pandemic. It has one shared playlist, but anyone can run their own instance :) It's pretty simple, any contributions are welcome :)

https://websocket-radio.herokuapp.com/ https://github.com/fraunos/websocket-radio

PS. it's funny that the authors of syncplay are polish as well, just like me :p

Very similar to your idea is Cytube, I've been using it for a while and it supports a lot of various video hosts which makes it very nice to watch basically anything together. I've even self-hosted clips I couldn't be bothered to upload to YT.

I'm curious, what's the advantage vs. the "ready, set, play/pause" method?

"Pausing, unpausing and seeking are synchronized over the Internet, giving everyone playing the same file in the same virtual room a shared viewing experience". Bathroom/popcorn breaks work out of the box

That doesn't work as well if you're chatting via instant messenger rather than voice chat.

Neat! So it's like multicast without needing to go through the group subscription puzzle of multicast with all the routers between you and friend(s).

just tried this out between my two laptops. pretty neat. you can chat too and the message will show up over the video.

it would be great if this worked for spotify as well so you could listen to a new album release or whatever

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