Inspiration
As an international student, I found it is difficult to watch videos with families and boyfriend which are far away from me. Thus, I decided to build a video player which allows two people from different places to watch the same video together.
What it does
It allows two users first pair and then play a video simultaneously, which enable each user to control both devices. If one user plays/pauses the video, the other's video will also be played/paused without any action.
How we built it
We use Python to build the backend and Swift for the iOS development. We use the AVPlayer library for playing videos and Alamofire library for HTTP part.
Challenges we ran into
- How to communicate with the server
- How to monitor the action from the AVPlayer
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Support two devices pair with each other by getting unique IDs from the server.
- Support online video playing from user input
- Support simultaneously play, pause and change the progress bar
What we learned
- Using HTTP in server-client communication
- Using the server as a bridge between clients in communication
- Using Alamofire and AVPlayer library in Swift
What's next for Pair-VideoPlayer
- Instead of HTTP, use socket for communication
- Automatically retrieve the URL of videos from websites
- Support online audio chat
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.