Movie Night

The network structure
The user client view
The host client view

Inspiration

Because of COVID-19, we were frustrated that we couldn't watch videos together with our friends in person like we used to. We decided to face this frustration by creating this website. In this website, users are able to create a private room and sync their YouTube videos with each other, as well as talk in a chat room. While this cannot fully replace watching together in person, it can still help people interact with each other and stay social during the pandemic.

What it does

HOST- The controller of the watch party
CLIENT- A watcher in the party
The first thing that happens is the server initializes the port and then listens for a host to create a room. When they do this, it sends a request to the server with a unique ID. The server then generates a room of that ID. That room has the unique ID, and uses that to access the chat feature, which is private and only seen by that room. Clients are able to join the room by going to the same website url as the host. The WebSocket of the client syncs with that of the host. When the host plays or pauses the YouTube player, the WebSocket tells the client to also play or pause. If the client tries to skip ahead or go out of sync with the host, their player will automatically resync.