[HN Gopher] Show HN: To fight quarantine boredom I build a site ...
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Show HN: To fight quarantine boredom I build a site to watch movies
with friends
Author : l1am0
Score : 138 points
Date : 2020-03-25 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bingetogether.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bingetogether.com)
| mceoin wrote:
| I've been waiting for this product. Nice work.
| derwiki wrote:
| Page <title> says "Bing Together"
| SwiftyBug wrote:
| We gotta stop the Google monopoly, right?
| l1am0 wrote:
| Love that one. Bing without e is fixed. Miss-typed it once
| and than copy pasted it too often.
| Reedx wrote:
| Anyone remember turntable.fm?
|
| I know a bunch of replacements popped up, but nothing seemed to
| capture the same kind of magic...
| crisnoble wrote:
| https://plug.dj/
| aantix wrote:
| After turntable.fm closed they briefly did Turntable Live.
|
| Which was the coolest online concert experience I ever had.
|
| I recorded a session. But sadly, not the system audio. But you
| can get a feel for the experience.
|
| https://youtu.be/08SvwB9S53U
| lintroller wrote:
| jqbx.fm uses only Spotify but has web, mac, android, and ios
| apps to sync Spotify listening.
| MivLives wrote:
| Yes, I actually helped make a clone of it for my final college
| project.
|
| Since then the cocnept has sort of died. I'm a little surprised
| it's not something that Spotify did more with. I know they have
| a colistening feature but I have yet to have anyone want to
| attempt that. As far as I can tell you need to link up by
| Facebook to even attempt that.
| text_exch wrote:
| For those who prefer text-based entertainment, I run an email
| newsletter called Thinking About Things [1], which sends out a
| link to an interesting article every day. It's aimed at curious
| people who don't have a lot of time to read - each email has an
| extended quote from the article so that you can see if it
| interests you. It's gotten very good reviews from readers.
|
| [1] https://www.thinking-about-things.com/
| allpratik wrote:
| That's really interesting. Was indeed in a need of one since a
| long time.
|
| Already subscribed now and excited to review few emails and
| their content. Thank you for starting and maintaining something
| like this.
| manigandham wrote:
| I recommend adding an archive of the past emails so I can
| review the content before signing up. You also get web visitors
| that way, people that would rather read websites or via RSS.
| awinder wrote:
| This is on my reading / testing list earlier today:
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/25/21191604/watch-movies-fri...
|
| Will have to add this to the list!
| [deleted]
| Avamander wrote:
| What differentiates this and cytube? (https://cytu.be)
| l1am0 wrote:
| BingeTogether.com is legal ;)
| kazinator wrote:
| > _To fight quarantine boredom I build a site to watch movies
| with friends._
|
| I would call it "CoVid: watch videos together, remotely."
| leafmeal wrote:
| Or even Covid.io (though that domain seems to be taken).
| l1am0 wrote:
| Hope folks will use it after corona as well, so no corona pun
| name for it xD
| black_puppydog wrote:
| CoBinge?
| willio58 wrote:
| Almost as perfect as it is morbid.
| choward wrote:
| The auction site for caskets?
| messe wrote:
| CoVidBid?
| Uehreka wrote:
| Right now I see a lot of folks making light of Covid-19 by
| coming up with silly pun-based names for sites, groups, etc.
| and I totally understand why: Many of us (especially in tech,
| where layoffs have been less bad than other sectors)
| currently associate this event with staying indoors, being
| kinda bored, trying to find things to do to pass the time.
| People are intellectual aware that there's a deadly virus out
| there, but haven't really emotionally reckoned with it.
|
| But I feel pretty confident that there's going to be a
| whiplash change in public perception over the next month, as
| a large percentage of the population comes to know Covid-19
| as the thing that killed friends or members of their
| families.
|
| So if you (the reader, this isn't necessarily aimed at GP)
| are considering naming something after Covid-19,
| Corona(virus) or the word "pandemic": I understand where
| you're coming from, but I'd advise you to think twice. You
| really don't want your brand to remind someone of the month
| they spent tending to a loved one with fluid in their lungs.
| whatshisface wrote:
| There are plenty of Hitler jokes out there, and a _ton_ of
| hurricane jokes for every hurricane that blows through the
| US. Cancer patients are sometimes sardonic about their
| condition. I really don 't think a death toll of 100,000 is
| enough to stop people from using gallows humor to cope. In
| fact, the higher the death toll, the more gallows humor you
| are likely to see.
|
| Further evidence: Coronavirus jokes have not become taboo
| in China.
| darawk wrote:
| While that's true, very few successful products are
| Hitler puns.
| TomMarius wrote:
| Yet. People will want to move on though.
| dmtroyer wrote:
| this is not intuitive.
| l1am0 wrote:
| What do you dislike about the interface? How can I improve it?
| Thanks for your help.
| dmtroyer wrote:
| I'm just confused. How is syncing supposed to work?
|
| 1. I start a "watch party" 2. I give the link to friends. 3.
| They click the button "Open the movie and check for
| autostart." 4. The video opens. At the beginning. Not where
| the other people are at.
|
| What is "Autostart"? You mention to "Open the movie directly
| and ask in the voice chat what time you should jump to". How
| is this different than just sharing the link to the video and
| pressing play at the same time or having them skip ahead. I
| don't understand.
| l1am0 wrote:
| Ah okay. So that button is to dominant Open the movie and
| check for autostart." is just the preperation to check if
| the video starts correctly e.g. if in firefox autoplay is
| allowed.
|
| The actually watch party starts when the countdown hits
| zero, by redirecting everyone in the same moment to the
| video.
|
| "Open the movie directly and ask in the voice chat what
| time you should jump to" is when you missed the start.
|
| Syncing works via starting everyone at the same time in the
| beginning of the movie
| aldoushuxley001 wrote:
| does anyone know of a good website to do this but for music?
| Ideally I'd love to be able to create room where buddies can
| join, we can chat and take turns suggesting songs to play that we
| all listen to. I would literally pay money for that.
| fuklief wrote:
| If you pay for spotify, https://www.jqbx.fm/ can do that.
| fonosip wrote:
| https://ba.net/screen-share-party
| fenwick67 wrote:
| MPD can handle the streaming part for you but you have to have
| access to all the files.
|
| https://musicpd.org/
| lprubin wrote:
| This site does that for Youtube: https://plug.dj/
| cameronbrown wrote:
| watch2gether.com does YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and
| SoundCloud
| a_t48 wrote:
| https://cytu.be/ - works with YT, SoundCloud, and some others.
| Avamander wrote:
| And also supports videos from various platforms and self-
| hosted content.
| leowoo91 wrote:
| I've entered a random youtube url, "open movie" test click worked
| fine but when the counter hit, it went to netflix... (Safari)
| l1am0 wrote:
| Oh wow. That was propably the dumbest bug I ever produced.
| Still hat my testing (netflix) url hardcoded in the countdown
| javascript.
|
| Works now. Thanks for reporting.
| Joof wrote:
| I've wanted this for so many years.
| errantspark wrote:
| My friends and I do this through Discord. One person shares their
| screen playing netflix/disney/whatever and then everyone just
| hangs out in voice and watches together. It's a really seamless
| experience and the re-encoding is usually not a problem, action
| scenes can get a little blocky but the quality is really pretty
| great.
| joecot wrote:
| It didn't seem like Discord sent desktop audio with the screen
| share. Does it do so, or did your friend do some magic to get
| it to work? I've read for ex you can use pulseaudio on linux to
| mix the input sources and then use that virtual output for
| Discord, but I'd be happy to find an easier way.
| TypeCaste wrote:
| Share the application, not the desktop. It will capture the
| application audio.
| SirYandi wrote:
| Not that this isn't a great idea and something I am now
| thinking of doing, but I wonder if you're breaking some digital
| rights law here (?)
| jordigh wrote:
| You are, and if you're in a big channel that brings a lot of
| attention and Discord notices it they'll probably shut it
| down. Same reason people don't just usually stream movies
| from Twitch. I've seen some Twitch channels that do, like the
| popular Bob Ross channel, but that's with approval of the
| rights owners who get a cut of the revenue.
|
| Keep it small and intimate in Discord and it will probably be
| okay.
| thrownaway954 wrote:
| your title attribute says "Bing Together", you're missing an "e"
| l1am0 wrote:
| Thanks!
| ryder9 wrote:
| treesnetwork.com still exists
| RangerScience wrote:
| Does this work with Chromecast? Netflix Party doesn't, and that's
| the main reason I don't use it.
| l1am0 wrote:
| No it does not, as there is no api for controling the playback
| on the chromecast
| kolchinski wrote:
| This is great, I've wanted something like this in the past!
| Thanks for building. I'll be giving it a try for a watch party I
| was planning with friends.
|
| Mind sharing how it works and what stack you used?
| l1am0 wrote:
| Awesome, hope it all works out.
|
| Stack is quite simple: Frontend: Bulma.css, Vanilla Javascript,
| HTML Backend: PHP, MariaDB
|
| It works by redirecting in the right moment to the streaming
| sites, via a JavaScript redirect.
|
| The voice chat is done via https://meet.jit.si/
|
| To handle potential big load, I force cloudflare to cache all
| sites under url /p/* thereby after the creation of the watch
| party, no request hits my server anymore :D
| joecot wrote:
| I'm guessing it doesn't handle people pausing the video like
| Netflix Party or SyncLounge does then?
| l1am0 wrote:
| No that is currently not possible, as there is no way of
| getting the information about the playback from the
| website.
|
| To enable this feature a browser plugin would be required
| again.
|
| With Binge Together I opted for not supporting that in
| favor of an easier use. (Not everyone included needs to
| install the extension etc.)
| smoyer wrote:
| This is an awesome project ... my daughters have been doing this
| a bit just using group-chat on their phones but I'm going to
| propose our small prep school has a movie night. I guess that
| will test it at scale ;)
| goda90 wrote:
| So my movie nights with friends used to involve watching a
| movie(on some streaming service or from disk), and then queuing
| up a bunch of random YouTube videos over Chromecast. It would be
| great if this wasn't tied to a single URL, but instead we could
| make a room and add videos to a queue to watch.
| l1am0 wrote:
| Awesome feature idea! This is currently the MVP and a lot more
| is to come. Will be added to my list.
|
| The problem would be on how to start the next video, as it is a
| javascript redirect only, so I have no information when a video
| in the queue is finished. Maybe websockets and someone pressing
| "next" could be an option.
| [deleted]
| jjice wrote:
| Really cool! Growing up, my friends and I spend many nights self
| queuing or on similar sites. Out of curiosity, what's your stack?
| Also, are there any plans for open source?
| l1am0 wrote:
| From other comment: Stack is quite simple: Frontend: Bulma.css,
| Vanilla Javascript, HTML Backend: PHP, MariaDB
|
| It works by redirecting in the right moment to the streaming
| sites, via a JavaScript redirect.
|
| The voice chat is done via https://meet.jit.si/
|
| To handle potential big load, I force cloudflare to cache all
| sites under url /p/* thereby after the creation of the watch
| party, no request hits my server anymore :D
|
| Currently I have no plan to open sourcing it
| adriand wrote:
| Sounds a little similar to https://rave.io/ Nice job!
| Animats wrote:
| You can do this in Second Life, although only for non-DRM video.
| There are movie theaters and big-screen TVs in the virtual world.
| You can watch with your friends, and talk or text to each other
| over the video.
| wolco wrote:
| That sounds interesting. How do you find the places?
| Animats wrote:
| Look for movie theaters. Or buy a virtual big-screen TV for
| your virtual house and invite friends over.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Finally! A use for the lumens I got from the Keybase
| giveaway
| amflare wrote:
| Does this require everyone to have an account for the paid
| services (Netflix for now)? Does this require anyone to have an
| account for the paid services if you happen to be able to get
| your hands on a Netflix URL?
| l1am0 wrote:
| Yes. Everyone involved need an account and needs to be logged
| in as well.
|
| It works by basically redirecting to the streaming website.
| mattste wrote:
| Have you investigated what it'd take to addd Hulu support? I find
| majority of my shows are split between Netflix and Hulu.
| l1am0 wrote:
| Not yet as Hulu is not supported in germany (my home country).
| Will digg into it in the next few hours.
|
| Would anyone be willing to share their hulu account with me so
| I can test it? bingehulu@simon-frey.com
| usrbintaco wrote:
| Does anyone want to babysit my kids remotely to fight boredom
| cause I'm losing my mind.
| chx wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18123862 is great. Really,
| really great. No idea why it's not more widely recognized or
| used.
| effingwewt wrote:
| I love this. I still speak fondly of the early days of netlfix,
| when it first got into streaming on the 360. You could invite an
| xbox live party to watch movies on Netflix. It had a border you
| could enable that made it look like a theatre screen with seats,
| with your live avatars sitting in them, a la Mystery Science
| Theatre.
|
| There was nothing quite like being in a chat party watching
| movies together. You could talk as loudly as you wanted while
| doing/eating what you wanted. Blew the actual theatre out of the
| water.
|
| Really amazing experience that was killed off way too soon
| (greed, Netflix didn't want non subscribers to watch free).
|
| Hopefully this is a road back there, definitely going to spread
| this around and show some $love
|
| edit: not finding a donation link, but if you get a link up I'm
| happy to do so!
| l1am0 wrote:
| Thanks for all your kind feedback: Did not think of donations
| so far, but here is my paypal: https://www.paypal.me/51edpo
|
| Binge Together, still needs everyone involved to have an
| account with the streaming services, thoug.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| This is very cool but I worry about your bandwidth bill if it
| takes off. Does voice chat go through the server?
| l1am0 wrote:
| I static cache all /p/* site via cloudflare and the voice chat
| is via jitsi meet an external privacy friendly service
| russfink wrote:
| What if someone is on a device like a Fire TV?
| l1am0 wrote:
| Currently this can not be supported with the tech stack I use.
| (As it uses javascript redirects to start a video)
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(page generated 2020-03-25 23:00 UTC)