The same video/music/playlist, etc playing on multiple screens in sync
(Sorry if this is a duplicate, I searched. I also asked about this a long time ago so maybe that counts as redundant... but here goes)
**Scenario**: I have 3 TV's in my house connected to Plex clients (1 Mac, 1 Win, and 1 Roku) and often need to move between rooms of the house to do various things during the day --but would like to be able to enjoy the same video/song, etc as I travel around the house.
I think it would be cool idea if you could sync playback of said items between locations. For instance if a video is playing on one device, either have a 'Sync up' option in the main screen, possibly On Deck section, or have Plex offer to sync up when I select to play the same video that is already playing on a different machine. First machine to play the video gets to be the "master" and all others will sync to it. I would imagine that the clients/server could measure latency and figure out exactly where the video needed to start to match up with the others and then share 'sync' data with the server every so often to make sure things are working out.
Note this is different from the 'Resume' feature that Plex already has.
This would be really cool. I’d love it for when I’m cleaning the house or cooking in the kitchen, because I’m going between my bedroom, living room, and kitchen frequently.
It may be really difficult to get it to sync up perfectly though. This wouldn’t matter for the video, but would be terrible for the audio if it wasn’t perfectly in sync.
I would think that since the server can tell the clients to play a video, it could also tell the clients to play a video starting at “X” amount of milliseconds, and then factor in the amount of milliseconds in differential of network latency (if any) and add that as an offset to allow them to all even out at the desired sync.
From there, you’d have to decide what happened if someone, say, paused the video… maybe the the client that issued the last command at that point becomes ‘lead duck’ until another command is recorded from a different client on the LAN.
I found this topic searching if my proposed feature has been requested or not... and I found it even with different purpose.
My idea is to use synchronized playback in the car.
By using two tablets in the rear side as a players and one mobile device serving local synchronized content.
In fact in my case perfect synchronization during all the playback is not so critical since both players will use headphones.
So I think preliminary implementation is not so complicated because mobile server can serve to more than one device already sending the order in both steps.
Just maybe some kind of way to send a synchronized start will be enough (for example creating a players pair).
Otherwise, synchronized streaming would be a nightmare -- a lowest common denominator scenario -- where any buffering problems encountered by one would be encountered by all, no? And if the "lead duck" issues a sync command, my client jumps back (ughhh) or forward (arghhh).
Haven’t seen any noise on this thread since 2013, so sorry for the thread bump.
Some ideas:
Whole-house audio: As I go from room to room, the same song is playing wherever I go. Or, if I’m watching something on the TV in the living room, the iPad in the kitchen is also playing the audio for it, so I don’t miss something when I go out to grab popcorn.
In the UI (probably the server web UI, or maybe dynamically client-initiated), allow creation of “zones”, consisting of multiple devices. Zones can be overlapping, not necessarily exclusive; thus activating playback of some content in a zone might disrupt playback on some devices which are also playing another zone. That’s okay; most recent selection wins, so the device won’t be confused.
Allow devices that have microphones (e.g. phones, laptops) to “listen” to special server-generated configuration tones coming from another device, so that playback delay can be calibrated. A device might not be eligible for zone membership until it’s been calibrated; or, check a box to override and say “I’m cool with some weird delay reverb” (good for folks with no microphone-enabled devices; or for rooms which aren’t close enough to have sound-bleed).
Competes with Sonos (maybe?); so hopefully the recent Sonos announcements don’t prohibit the development of an awesome feature like this.
The closest you might get here is a Broadcast stream that all clients lock onto but even then Latency makes the Sync nearly impossible to do.
Want proof? Open up any live stream on the Internet on two different devices and see what happens.
There is another request for this that has quite a bit more traction. It might be better to add your vote to that thread, rather than spread votes among several threads.
