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Feature Request - Watching Together


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miniliQuid

well, though very usefull it's not that essential, and the likes and support for this idea/topic shows it :(
perhaps in the future it will suddenly get a huge bump in votes making it more interesting to implement :)

seen it with other requests that hardly got any votes at first, but later on quickly goes towards 100 comments + votes :D
but yeah, don't get your hopes up for this pandemic, maybe the next one ;)

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Hoping that enough people have support forum accounts, and know to like threads in the request subforum, and actually do that is too high a bar to gauge community interest in a feature I'd say.

This feature was extremely useful to myself and many others I know, so much that I had to buy that other (inferior) popular media server app which implemented this feature within 2 months of the pandemic getting bad. 😡

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miniliQuid

Well I guess there is no doubt about it that there are more emby users off the forum than on it I guess.
Many server hosts probably have lots of accounts/members that only roam their server and not this forum.

But how do would you suggest starting to gauge their "wants/votes"?
I don't see a solution for this besides a guessing game, which is hardly a solution, specially since most server hosts will forward the requests of their users on this forum anyway?
 

Edited by miniliQuid
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jackandjohn
1 hour ago, miniliQuid said:

But how do would you suggest starting to gauge their "wants/votes"?
 

A “reasonable” solution is asking “Who is the ideal user?”, and “What does the ideal user want?”

If the ideal user is someone who prefers to watch alone, with a large library, and multiple devices, then that’s pretty easy: bug-free media playback, library, smart watch-tracking (such as position within a video, which episode of the season, etc), and probably sync.

If, however, the ideal user is someone who mostly likes to watch with others then that’s a different thing, and the pandemic has left them with little real options. In that case the ideal user would want to get as close as possible to in-person watching together: being able to give others a single link, or invite them through emby itself (other viewers usually don’t want to spend time doing the setup), keeping both clients as in-sync as possible, etc. User interface isn’t even really that important to that ideal user as long as they can connect with the people they care about.

Through this lens, I would not argue that it’s *easy* to determine what voted features to work on next, but it certainly becomes possible.

Edited by jackandjohn
typo
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seanbuff
On 27/12/2020 at 08:01, Xorp said:

This feature was extremely useful to myself and many others I know, so much that I had to buy that other (inferior) popular media server app which implemented this feature within 2 months of the pandemic getting bad. 😡

@Xorp @jackandjohn I think you are confusing this feature request with Multi-Cast or Sync Play, someone already created a tool for that here

This FR is for local viewing sessions where everyone is physically in the same room, and yet can all have an updated 'Watched' status after playing something.

You should go and add your support for Multi-Cast Support which is what I think you're referring to (remote viewing sessions that are in sync)
https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/17805-multi-cast-support/

 

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jackandjohn
11 hours ago, seanbuff said:

@Xorp @jackandjohn I think you are confusing this feature request with Multi-Cast or Sync Play, someone already created a tool for that here

This FR is for local viewing sessions where everyone is physically in the same room, and yet can all have an updated 'Watched' status after playing something.

Yep, you’re totally right, thank you for pointing that out. I got this one mixed up since I’m also in the discussions about watching together remotely.

My examples are off-base, but I still stand behind my point about how to choose new features.

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The "Watch with Others" is already supported on a few applications. I know Kodi, EMC, and Blue Neon Night on Roku all support this. You choose the main user and log in. Then you choose who else is in the room watching with you. Then you would watch items and the played status and resume points are mirrored among all the users watching in room. Then after you are done you would use sign-out and choose "Only Me in the Room" and it removes the other users from your session. The session now belongs to just the one user who originally logged in. This is how it works inside Blue Neon Night which can be found here:

I am sure eventually the "Watch with Others" and the "Watch Together" will both get implemented as these are valuable functions with high user engagement. All of these legacy features will make it back into the present day apps eventually.

Edited by speechles
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Quadrubo

Hello,
I just made a Chrome Extension for this. It of course doesn't have full functionality like the real feature would and it only works in Chrome but I though some of you will still find a use in it.
Here is the Github: https://github.com/Quadrubo/emby-sync-watch
Here the Thread I made in the Forums: 

 

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kingy444

Was looking around and I believe emby’s off-shoot (jellyfin) has similar functionality to this built in already - I would hope that might help expedite development of this for the emby team.

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jackandjohn
4 minutes ago, kingy444 said:

Was looking around and I believe emby’s off-shoot (jellyfin) has similar functionality to this built in already - I would hope that might help expedite development of this for the emby team.

Could you link us to the page about that functionality? I’m very curious!

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kingy444
32 minutes ago, jackandjohn said:

Could you link us to the page about that functionality? I’m very curious!

looks like they call it syncplay - they appear to have removed some of the concerns raised here in making each individual user join the ‘room/group’ from their profile. 
this works fine I guess but would also like to have static rooms so I could just select it for both the wife and I and not make her open emby just to confirm she is watching
 

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/pull/1011
 

https://jellyfin.org/posts/jellyfin-10-6-0/

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Xorp
On 5/15/2021 at 5:39 PM, Quadrubo said:

Hello,
I just made a Chrome Extension for this. It of course doesn't have full functionality like the real feature would and it only works in Chrome but I though some of you will still find a use in it.
Here is the Github: https://github.com/Quadrubo/emby-sync-watch
Here the Thread I made in the Forums: 

 

You're a hero!

I have no idea why the devs aren't interested in implementing it as an official feature. It would have been such a greater driver sales of the Premiere edition.

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8 minutes ago, Xorp said:

You're a hero!

I have no idea why the devs aren't interested in implementing it as an official feature. It would have been such a greater driver sales of the Premiere edition.

We have already expressed interest in this, apparently not in this particular topic, but in others like it.

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  • 2 months later...
  • 1 month later...
2 hours ago, zedjawiz said:

How come this feature is out for Plex and Jellyfin, but not out for this??

Just different priorities for right now. For a while only a few people expressed interest in Watch together but the feature request is gaining popularity.

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jackandjohn
40 minutes ago, cayars said:

Just different priorities for right now. For a while only a few people expressed interest in Watch together but the feature request is gaining popularity.

It's also quite difficult to get exactly right.

 

For example: If you use Plex and Jellyfin's "watch together" right now while you're FaceTiming with the person you're watching with, it will be very distracting because the videos are not actually playing at the same time, but more like within 1-2 seconds of each other. I dare anyone to watch a scary movie for a remote date night: only one person will be surprised by the jump scares..

BigScreen on the Quest *nails* it, but they also built it from the ground up specifically for watching together.

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1 hour ago, jackandjohn said:

BigScreen on the Quest *nails* it, but they also built it from the ground up specifically for watching together.

What is this?

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jackandjohn
7 minutes ago, cayars said:

What is this?

A VR app: https://www.bigscreenvr.com/

I've successfully used it for watching TV shows and movies together. They have some free channels (like a Start Trek channel), you can pay for tickets to watch other content, and if everyone has a video file downloaded to their individual Quests, it will sync-play the local file in the VR space.

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  • 1 year later...
On 9/2/2021 at 11:54 AM, jackandjohn said:

A VR app: https://www.bigscreenvr.com/

I've successfully used it for watching TV shows and movies together. They have some free channels (like a Start Trek channel), you can pay for tickets to watch other content, and if everyone has a video file downloaded to their individual Quests, it will sync-play the local file in the VR space.

Big Screen DLNA support with Emby Server is resolved in the Emby DLNA plugin version 1.1.4+. Thanks !

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  • 10 months later...
l4kr411
On 9/2/2021 at 3:27 PM, Carlo said:

Just different priorities for right now. For a while only a few people expressed interest in Watch together but the feature request is gaining popularity.

It's 2024 btw. I am a paying user btw. If you stayed open source I wouldn't be mad but this is not acceptable. When are we getting this feature?

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