I have a simple idea, that I would love to see in the next major update. "Watch Together"
The basis for the idea would be to allow, 2 or more users to watch the same content at the exact same time.
this will allow friends/family to enjoy movies together while apart, provided that the bandwidth is adequate.
I would like this to be possible from two remote locations. IE: Not just 1 local and 1 remote stream, but multiple remote streams if required.
The invite link to start watching a "watch together" should link to a plex account, and should be view able from the website and phone apps.
I would leave the actual implementation up to you, but it would be a nice starting idea.
Bonus features:
-Being able to pause/rewind the movies from either end, without direct server control. This would enable easy bathroom breaks without further communication.
-Being able to have a local chat with users who are watching, maybe even audio so we can hear each others reactions.( or snoring if they fell asleep)
-Allowing/disabling custom bitrates for connected clients. Ideally it would always stream at max or 10Mbps, to all parties but sometimes phones cant keep up and need a bit of down sampling. Being able to use custom bitrates per person would be good, assuming the server can handle it.
-Maybe an option to have pre-render buffer, would allow for better multi-user/ multi-bitrate
If anyone has some ideas or suggestions to go along with this idea, please post I would love to hear positive feedback.
There is a request for this feature in the PlexPASS Feature Request Voting Forum - already has more than 270 users backing it
‘Tandem Playback’ to several clients
I am putting a link to it but you will not have access as it is in a PlexPASS forum
Summary of the Request:
Since this feature has grown in demand, and since we've spotted three different requests with very similar requirements, we are consolidating the three posts into this one. Here is the current feature requirements as we see it now.
Tandem Play Feature Requirements
The objective is to have multiple different devices playing the same content at the same time. Tandem/Sync'd playback should be able to be started either from a centralized GUI (the Server Web GUI) or from the individual clients, which should be able to “see” currently playing content and join the stream. Consideration should be made to restrict the control (play, pause, forward, etc) to specific nominated client(s). Played content SHOULD work even when devices have different codec requirements. If this becomes too complex, it is acceptable that an initial version works only with "Direct Play" enabled devices. Sync'd content It MUST work with different types of devices (samsung TVs / Roku's and Ipads playing same stream, for instance). Tandem Play should be made available for all media types covering video, music, photo slideshow and slideshow with music.
When content is playing in the local network, the objective is to maintain very synchronized playback. To the point where audio streaming from multiple devices sound in sync and video being watched in one device while audio comes from a different device does not display lip-sync issues. Ideally, this should also be done via Multicast in order to alleviate the bandwidth issues on the W-fi network which will undoubtedly arise.
Thanks to SA2000, te5s3akt, and for all that have contributed to define this feature. Cheers!
I would love this. I am working on setting up my second Rasplex box (w/ VPN and HostADP) for when I’m on the road and want to watch something with my kids (while they are at home). I currently am not a PlexPass user, but if this feature was available, I could sell the lifetime subscription cost to the misses. But that means I can’t vote…
While I have no objection to this idea and it seems like it might be a good thing for the gregarious Plex users out there I strongly doubt that it is possible with any reasonable stability and reliability without a LOT of work and a good deal of reliance on the connection of the various clients and the power of the server.
I can see that it would be quite a challenge to keep the streams in sync and to handle pausing and other playback issues on the potentially different clients.
One of the problems I see as causing problems is one client needing transcoding and the other not or one client being unable to play a particular bitrate or format without more processing than the other. There are also the issue of latency effecting the syncing of the streams.
Those are just a couple of the problems that an attempt to implement that feature would run into. I do not know that the problems are either insurmountable or prohibitively time consuming but I suspect that they are.
It may be that the best solution would simply be for the parties that want to watch together to simply start the playback at the same time. There would be sync issues with that but those would be no worse than if one tries to control playback on the other.
I think that implementing this would be extremely, possibly prohibitively, difficult and ultimately not popular enough to justify the time/effort needed to make it work and when it works it may be little better than manually playing two or more streams.
Plex has a LOT of more doable things that need to be done/fixed/completed that are both easier and more needed than this but if I am wrong about the difficulty then Plex should implement it but, if I am not wrong, then Plex should do other, more needed, things first.
