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Netflix Party Play?
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Netflix Party Play?Posted:

Cartel_0
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I was wondering if anyone here has any technical knowledge of how the old Netflix Party Play function on Xbox 360/Playstation 3 used to work? Basically it let you and your friend watch the same movie at the same time, but I have no idea how it accomplishes this. It's probably a long shot, but if anyone has any idea how it works that would be great, I kind of need to know how it works for a project I am working on. Thanks.
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nolanberollin
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I remember this but I have no idea how it worked. The only thing I know is that the movie would always start 2 minutes after my friends movies started. So it wasn't perfected.
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Cartel_0
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Convicts- wrote I remember this but I have no idea how it worked. The only thing I know is that the movie would always start 2 minutes after my friends movies started. So it wasn't perfected.
Yea, it definitely had it's flaws but I remember that it used to work for the most part. I am looking into making something similar to it but have no idea really of how it works.
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ObscureCoder
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Cartel_0 wrote
Convicts- wrote I remember this but I have no idea how it worked. The only thing I know is that the movie would always start 2 minutes after my friends movies started. So it wasn't perfected.
Yea, it definitely had it's flaws but I remember that it used to work for the most part. I am looking into making something similar to it but have no idea really of how it works.


In a perfect world, you'd attempt to sync the streaming of video data from the server to the connected clients (in the party) - so that one doesn't buffer when the others are playing perfectly. This however is very impractical as some connections are weak and shit.

I once made a demo of this concept using a HTML5 video player and AJAX. The JS would use AJAX to poll a PHP script to see if the 'cinema' was playing (my concept was an online cinema experience - chat during film, unanimous pause, screenshots, whiteboard etc.)
The video being played was rather compressed. Like a 5mb mp4 file.

Since both me and my friend's connections were similar in terms of speed - it worked very well. Another thing you could do, which would cause major annoyance, is: every like 5 mins have all the clients send all of their current movie positions in seconds and then find a mean time and ask if the clients want to sync (subtly, of-course, as to not break the movie experience).

It's hard to realtime synchronize data streaming from servers as connections vary. However, you can create something that's usable - just not perfect (if it was like a family LAN application - it'd work incredibly well).

AJAX probably isn't the best solution over long-polling but it worked for me.
That's the basic concept - you can probably find more from a google search as this is my understanding and I'm sure there are some media streaming experts out there who can spread some light on how it all works.

Depends what language(s) you wanna use (desktop or website).
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vRice
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ObscureCoder wrote
Cartel_0 wrote
Convicts- wrote I remember this but I have no idea how it worked. The only thing I know is that the movie would always start 2 minutes after my friends movies started. So it wasn't perfected.
Yea, it definitely had it's flaws but I remember that it used to work for the most part. I am looking into making something similar to it but have no idea really of how it works.


In a perfect world, you'd attempt to sync the streaming of video data from the server to the connected clients (in the party) - so that one doesn't buffer when the others are playing perfectly. This however is very impractical as some connections are weak and shit.

I once made a demo of this concept using a HTML5 video player and AJAX. The JS would use AJAX to poll a PHP script to see if the 'cinema' was playing (my concept was an online cinema experience - chat during film, unanimous pause, screenshots, whiteboard etc.)
The video being played was rather compressed. Like a 5mb mp4 file.

Since both me and my friend's connections were similar in terms of speed - it worked very well. Another thing you could do, which would cause major annoyance, is: every like 5 mins have all the clients send all of their current movie positions in seconds and then find a mean time and ask if the clients want to sync (subtly, of-course, as to not break the movie experience).

It's hard to realtime synchronize data streaming from servers as connections vary. However, you can create something that's usable - just not perfect (if it was like a family LAN application - it'd work incredibly well).

AJAX probably isn't the best solution over long-polling but it worked for me.
That's the basic concept - you can probably find more from a google search as this is my understanding and I'm sure there are some media streaming experts out there who can spread some light on how it all works.

Depends what language(s) you wanna use (desktop or website).


**** that it'd be easier to invite them over, even if they lived in Kenya 1234((
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