I recently held a Watch Together party for 6 transatlantic friends. Some were able to pre-download the media with the PlexPlayer and others were only able to transcode through a browser.
We’ve done it a few times.
I recode the media in advance to make it easier to sync and I try(!) to get them to use original quality, it’s still guaranteed to be problematic with a bunch of sync loops.
What would be good, esp when some are suspected of having unstable internet or bad wifi, is to add a feature to Watch Together… Presentation Mode.
In Presentation Mode, one person is selected to be the presenter of the media.
Typically it would be the plex pass owner, but if setting up a party for friends and you can’t attend then one of the others can be assigned as presenter.
Once everyone’s in and ready then the media auto starts as per a normal Watch Together session. The big difference being that only the presenter is able to pause and skip forward/back during the playback.
All the clients play as normal unless they get >10s out of sync with the Presenter.
If they get >10s out of sync then the player attempts to skip to the matching timestamp to the presenter.
This way, if Ivor Badlan has a network dip and time drifts then noone else is affected and his player will try to rejoin at the right point in the media.
I’m currently re-reading your suggestion… could you elaborate the specific use case for that?
I imagine watching a movie and suddenly I’m skipping 10 seconds of dialog because my stream apparently got out of sync with the “presenter” (which I hadn’t even noticed while watching).
From what I’ve been reading, it’s not totally unexpected for different streams to get slightly out of sync over the duration of a movie (tbh I’m even seeing this w/ classic TV when the neighbors with their satellite dish get to cheer a few seconds before the cable neighbors when their team scores… though that’s not so much a watching-in-sync situation) – so I’m not entirely sure what you’re trying to achieve.
I’m going on the premise that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
If 1 (or more) people with an unstable connection is causing issues for everyone on the watch party, then having the presentation mode option would mean that only that one person’s client will skip forward/back in order to stay within the time tolerance.
As an example, during Halloween we held a horror movie night.
Some of our friends are out in remote locations and/or using old hardware and as a result we experienced frequent playback loops as the server tried to re-sync all the clients. It was a bad experience for all.
In the end some of the people switched to playing it outside of Watch Together as the looping was ruining their immersion.
10s was just an example timeframe.
Having it configurable would be handy as it 30s may be a better option depending on the media being played.
Looking at the server side I could see that everyone was within about 3s of each other, so while not 100% to the second it was close enough that jumpscares and gore would make for funny comms in our discord.
Perhaps instead of a Presentation Mode, maybe allow the server’s sync tolerance to be a configurable value so that it would allow for more of a time drift before attempting to resync all the clients?
As noted in our previous announcement, our existing Watch Together functionality will not be included in our new experience apps on launch, which are currently in preview and will be released broadly in the future.
As such, we’re closing related feature suggestions in order to give back those votes, so that you can vote for something else.
We do not preclude the possibility of offering similar functionality again in the future, as we also noted in our announcement. Should that happen, then feature suggestions like this one and others would certainly be considered during that development.
A new suggestion related to adding Watch Together to our new experience apps has already been raised and you’re welcome to comment or vote on that suggestion.
