Why?
Why create this when things like Plex or Jellyfin exist?
Plex, Jellyfin and other similar projects have allowed users to keep their media in one place but they haven't made it very easy to watch it together.
Sometimes there are random issues that make the watching experience very annoying.
Things like random buffering, stuttering, or synchronization issues even while having plenty of bandwidth and hardware to handle playback.
Other media
What if you wanted to watch a YouTube video, a short, or a Twitch clip?
What if you wanted to show your friends a replay you got on your hard drive?
You don't keep these on your media server.
You have a few options:
-
Send it over chat
- Size limitations
- Back to the countdown method
-
Upload to YouTube
- Time consuming
- Copyright issues = video gets blocked
- Still needs a countdown unless you use the next point
-
Find a website that allows for watching YouTube or uploaded files together
- Uploaded file size limitations
- Possible time or quality limitations
- Advertisements in every possible place
- Synchronization issues
- Registration/Login - personal information extraction, possible password leak
- Who knows what else they put on it
The solution
Having suffered through all existing solutions and always bumping into some sort of issue...
Enough is enough.
I had to solve this.
Being a programmer has its downsides but there is also the big upside of being able to write your own software.
Using .NET / C# with a burning hatred for web development, I didn't think it was possible to make standalone graphical applications very easily. Especially one that has a video player.
However, I eventually found - Avalonia UI.
A nice cross-platform UI framework.
But that unfortunately doesn't solve the video player issue as there is no video player yet.
Then came the second crucial discovery - LibVLCSharp with support for Avalonia.
Thanks to the team over at VLC there was a way for me to stay in C# and still make what I needed.
If you didn't know - VLC is a free and open-source media player that can probably handle anything you can throw at it.
I would highly recommend using it as your main media player.
So I started and didn't stop until I could watch all the movies and series with my friend without any issues.
It took days, weeks, and months to get things working properly and looking acceptable.
Making user interfaces isn't my strong side so it still has a lot of space for improvements.
(have a look at the gallery)
In the end I can now finally watch whatever I want together with my friend.
There are no longer any random issues with stuttering, buffering, or synchronization.
Once media loads, the playback starts, and there are no issues with the internet connection - it will just work.
(Unless I screw something up in an update or there are issues on other platforms I am not aware of yet)
Native application performance and VLC codec support, meaning you can play pretty much anything you throw at it.
No transcoding or remuxing needed.
Now, I am not breaking the laws of physics here.
If your internet connection or hardware simply can not handle streaming a given media file, it won't magically solve this issue.
(Although, if internet speed is a common issue, we could talk about pre-downloading and watching from a local file in the future)
For an example go to bandwidth
The community
Since I had this problem, there is a good chance that others are also having it.
I have seen posts asking for help with playback issues, and looking for solutions to watching together.
The plan is to let everyone test/use it for free but ask for a purchase/payment to support the project.
There won't be any limitations in the free version.
Currently, no code is even written to ask for or take payments.
Core features and stability come first.