Very cool. I'd love to work with you to bring interesting apps to it.
Also, not sure if you have put much effort into trying to synch YouTube very accurately (down to the 20th of a second or better), but if that is interesting or important to you, I've done a good bit of work with dealing with the inaccuracies of YouTube's timer via the API and I'd be glad to share my code as well as ideas for this. I've found I can get it very accurate by using a bit of smoothing combined with looking at the system time. (I haven't yet done cross-internet synching and dealing with latency, but I have a plan for it)
How does realtime screensharing with something like Netflix work? If it's actual screensharing, wouldn't it be super laggy and low quality? Do you somehow get each user to stream the exact same Netflix URL in the sense that it's not actually screensharing but rather there are just multiple clients (which sounds like it could be a legal problem...)?
Netflix is DRM'd anyway so it's a non-starter. Try taking a screenshot of a Netflix stream. Not many people realize it'll just result in black pixels for that area.
This reminds me of the old windows 98 times, where windows would just draw a blackish rectangle where the video should be and the graphics card would replace the pixels with actual video on-screen. If you hit the print button, you would just copy the windows graphic buffer with no video to be seen.
It got extra weird when you would paste the screenshot into paint with the video still playing. Suddenly you had a video playing inside paint and could even draw on it...
I'm not sure I should share my secrets now lol. But the answer is linux. I haven't tried screensharing before. But I have tried with other DRM stuff and it got blocked. So I wouldn't be surprised if this was a fluke. Definitely makes making memes easier though.
If the video quality is low enough then Netflix and co don't bother. It also varies on who is the content supplier, some are less fussed about protecting content that doesn't bring in much money.
OpenArena! <3 It didn't work for me (something about the v6 address not resolving, and then a stream of 'connection reset by peer' msgs in the OA console; too bad it has to be in-browser and I can't just launch my native client) but I love that this is a thing, it's one of my favorite games ever.
Edit: NES games also don't work for me, I keep seeing "Load a ROM file to play a NES game!" but others in the room are playing. Firefox on Linux, this is. Can I register a ticket somewhere or are there debugging tips I could try myself?
I tried starting a room with the NES app and it told me to load a .nes file. However, the dialogue it launched was for photos (on my Android device). I don't think there's any way to select a .nes file from there.
I would love to know the legal implications of running a service where people are able to stream copyrighted content to others, or to share subscription services like Netflix in violation of its TOS.
I think that's a really nice concept, and quite possibly a good time to bring this to our notice whenever most of us are home bound. Do you plan on adding more features in the features?
This is cool, I'm especially interested in YouTube synching so I can share videos with my daughter when she is at her moms. Also so she can chat with her friends while school is canceled and they can watch stuff together. (hopefully being able to talk to each other too?)
I'm surprised I haven't seen this before (or if it's been around, it hasn't been more popular). In person you often show people videos and via podcasts I often hear people haphazardly trying to play videos simultaneously.
I created Togethr.TV in 2013 (https://togethr.tv). People can watch videos together and chat (text/audio) and some other features. It never took off much unfortunately.
I didn't touch the code since some time already but it is still working fine, the site is currently having about 15k monthly users.
I was surprised that even public rooms require a request to join from the lobby page. Though I also know that direct room links do let you in to the channel which is what you'd be passing around to your friends.
And I was also surprised that when someone sends me a join request, it completely blots my screen out with a modal. Seems like this would be very annoying if you were actually running a channel. I think that needs some attention. For example, am I ruining someone's experience by constantly sending them join requests?
Online hangout was always a dream of mine ever since my friends and I used socks to tie the home phone around our heads so we could talk while playing Unreal Tournament online together. Always cool to see people trying to work on this.
I was just reading about On-nomi (オン飲み) - drinking online. Was a Boing Boing post at https://boingboing.net/2020/03/13/on-nomi.html Perhaps this needs to be added for us mandatory-work-from-home people can have a beer later with co-workers.
This is great. Been looking for a way to create a "virtual water cooler" for our team as we move 40+ people remote. Does the room always exist, and people can hop in and out? What's the business model? IE how can we pay for the service/support the mission?
No, it never closes because is a URL that you can always come back. We stay in there working for hours, sometimes with multiple screen sharing at the same time.
Love this! Especially the fact that you can launch an OpenArena server so easily! Played a lot of Quake 3 Arena during my college days. Hadn't heard of OpenArena before. Thanks!
EDIT: Is there a way to store and load a config file? Or have the binds stored permanently?
Reminds me of rabb.it. Very disappointed to see a link to Discord and lack of link to source. I was hoping this was going to be free software, but now I'm thinking it's unlikely. Playing OpenArena in the browser is an interesting idea.
* Audio wasn't working at all, even after 10 minutes of trying to get it to work (permissions were granted). At this point I'm not sure if it's a feature or a bug.
* Half of the apps aren't available.
I'm sorry, but in the current state it is not usable for me, or anyone I know, at all. Compared to whereby, hangouts, etc I'm not sure which currently existing features it really offers that are better.
I'm impressed when I see people actually build something that they believe in, rather than just work for the man.
This looks to me like more than someone could build in their free time while they work for a soul sucking corporation. I mean, maybe, but it's not possible for everyone. I hope he or she figures out a way of making a living at it.
Looks slick, seems to work real well on mobile too. Good work!
I noticed when creating a private room there's no auth, would it be possible to have something simple even like a shared password so you need something more than just the link to join? Also would it be possible to make it request audio and/or video access by default when joining, rather than making it a user action?
Seems like the rooms are meant to be fairly disposable, so any situation where you would normally "change the room password", you instead just change rooms.
Great idea especially with a lot of people staying home in light of COVID-19. I've been considering ways to stay connected with friends and family now that I'm spending more time alone.
I've been considering doing regular Google Hangouts with open invites to make hanging out feel more spontaneous.
This is pretty cool - I'm wondering what like, makes it different than just having a zoom call or something on discord? I can tell it's different I just don't know how to articulate it and I'm curious how you'd differentiate it from other ways to hang out online?
I've been hosting a YouTube trippy video room for 30 minutes now. My only suggestion is to kill the pop over modal every time somebody wants to join. Kills your ability to interact as the modal can pop up anytime
Should just let anyone pop in without the need to accept every individual person
They're talking about how you, the room host, get an entire "user wants to join" modal that disrupts the whole UI every time someone wants to join the room. You should just add requests to the sidebar or something, not use a modal.
This is very cool! Tried it now with my friends. The main complaint is that a grid view would be better than vertical (or horizontal) bars. Also would be nice to have done indication which anonymous animal is which video. Thanks for this!
I noticed your contact is in a discord channel and my first thought was how this is differentiated from discord. If people are actually contacting you on discord and this is "installation free", why not make that contact via your own service?
SFC and SMC files are usually identical. It’s just a different choice in file extension.
“SMC” comes from Super MagiCom, a floppy-based cart copying device for backup/piracy. The original .smc files produced by the device contained a 512 byte header. Since it’s pretty easy to detect and ignore most emulators do. If not, it’s easily removed.
Because .smc is in reference to effectively a piracy device, the new preferred file extension is .sfc and has been for a while now.
(In case it is not obvious, the file format is nominally just a raw dump of the ROM on the cartridge with no added headers.)
(Note 2: if you are looking for a way to run homebrew/patches/etc on a real SNES/SFC nowadays, sd2snes is probably the absolute best option.)
It allows you to create virtual rooms where you can chat with room members using webcam and microphone and run realtime apps that include:
- Screensharing(useful for e.g. Netflix)
- Cowatching video player
- SNES and NES Emulators
- Virtual cardtable
- Poker with Playmoney
- Quake 3 in-browser!
- Synced YouTube player
and many more coming.