flixparty

A very simple and janky tool to synchronize play-pause events across different PCs to watch video content together on platforms, which do not support watch parties.

Warning

Because this app is basically a keylogger, you might run into some antivirus issues when downloading the pre-compiled binaries. If this is the case, you might want to compile the client locally on the target system.

How does it work?

Via the config, every client connects to a common Redis pub-sub channel. When a client detects a key-press on the configured toggle-key (defaulty P), an event is published in the pub-sub channel. All clients listen to the toggle-event and will, when received, issue a key press of the configured playback-key (defaultly Space) on the local machine. This should pause the currently playing content of the currently focussed window on all connected clients.

Why not use the same key for toggling as well as for the playback control? Sadly, rdev - the crate used to detect and simulate keyboard events - can not distinguish between simulated and real keyboard events. Thus, binding both on the same key would result in a really unhandy infinite feedback loop.

Setup

First of all, you need to set up a public Redis instance where the clients connect to. Either, you can self-host Redis on your own infrastructure, or you can simply use free tier alternatives like from redis.io.

Then, download or build the client application.

After that, you need a config file. You can simply use the provided example config as a starting point. Defaultly, the client looks for a flixparty.config.toml in the current working directory (the directory where you launch the app from). Alternatively, you can pass a path to a config file, if you want to store it somewhere else.

./flixparty path/to/my/config.toml

In the config, set the address of your redis instance as address in the connection block. Also, set the name of the channel to be used for communication between the clients. This can be any arbitrary string, but it must be the same one for all of the clients who should be connected. This way, you can also use the same Redis instance for multiple sessions by using different channel names, if you want.