Hi everyone! Some time ago I discovered a site called Netflix Party, where people can watch Netflix in real time together with friends.
📺 FileParty lets you do the same with your own mp4's and mp3's. Actually, you can look at images together too. Or just transfer files.
To be honest, I am a bit unsure if this product is useful when we already have screen sharing in video calls. But I imagine there are some situations where screen sharing doesn't cut it. When you need high quality.
Some usecases:
- Video maker working on a draft of a video. Watch it together with someone to get feedback.
- Remote Teacher who wants everyone to see the images/videos in high quality.
- Watching a movie with friends (if you have movie file on your computer).
I built this using WebTorrent and WebRTC. It is all p2p, the files are transferred directly.
Hope it can be useful for some of you in this pandemic. Let me know if you have questions!
This is awesome. For example, travelling on planes without having to share a single device and crank your neck to see the screen properly. Tonnes of little uses like that. Would be good to collect a list of use-cases on the website to inspire people on how to use something like this.
The idea seems very exciting. Kudos to you for coming up with something like this.
However, I tried to test it out with a 35MB mp4 file from my laptop and on the other device it hhad a progress bar which said 35MB and 'load required'. So I assume it's gonna download the file first and then start streaming? If thats the case it might not be very ideal for streaming larger media files like movies and stuff with friends.
Please correct me if I'm missing something.
@tejav2s Hi, thanks! There are different streaming methods based on the type of video files. There are 3 different ways to play the video files in the browser:
videostream -- best option, supports streaming with seeking, but only works with MP4-based files for now (uses MediaSource API)
mediasource -- supports more formats, supports streaming without seeking (uses MediaSource API)
Blob URL -- supports the most formats of all (anything the tag supports from an http url), with seeking, but does not support streaming (entire file must be downloaded first)
So mp4 files should work well, but I'm not sure about the specifics so could be some edge cases.
Sometimes it also get stuck a bit, so you can try to restart the site and drag the file again.
Let me know if you can make it work!
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