A good friend of mine just asked me if we can have a watch party in the upcoming days over the internet, so we can watch a movie together. They live in another country.
Now, streaming platform have the “Watch Party” option, but is not worth it to pay them an entire subscription just for one movie and one day, so I was wondering if there was an app that allowed me to have a watch party, streaming the movie from a local file.
I want it to be easy to use and have a mobile client/app, since this person is not very techy like me.
Thanks in advance.
This is usually a function that full blown media servers offer.
Jellyfin is the one that jumps to mind with this functionality, however I haven’t really this functionality out as of yet.
Jellyfin’s watch-together-feature (can’t remember the name) worked very well on my local network when we needed it (remember Covid? +__+), so I guess it could also be an option if you do it with Wireguard or something similar.
Browser-based, but works on mobile just fine: https://www.watchparty.me
The amount of viewers you can stream to depends on your upload speed and video bitrate. There’s a premium version that allows relaying video files via their servers.
It’s also open source so you can host it yourself should you want to.
This is just what I needed! My group has been using Discord for the longest time but it very frequently turns into a 144p stream
Plex can do it, but I assume you need a Plex Pass. I haven’t used the feature myself.
In the past I used Cytu.be but you’d need to upload video (e.g. to twitch)
If you have a good internet connection you can just screen share the movie over any messaging app. The delay should be under a second and be in-sync with the audio delay. So no-one gets spoiled. You might receive the reaction of your friend a little late but it shouldn’t matter too much.
There’s https://opentogethertube.com/ but it only works with mp4s not mkvs so you’d need to reencode most files you can acquire from the high seas …
