Synchronised Media Playback Between Clients (1 Viewer)

[robbo100]

I wonder if it might be possible to allow synchronisation of media playback between different clients on the network (for any media). What I mean by this, is creating a system (plugin?) whereby if someone is viewing/listening to media on client A, then someone on client B can select an option on their MP2 menu to connect to client A. When they do this, client B will start playing the media already playing on client A synchronously.

There are a number of scenarios where this would be useful (ignoring the obvious one - "it would be cool". A couple of examples are:

1) Having a house party with a music playlist, and you want to have the same music playing in each room in the house (I personally would use this loads for general music listening).

2) The user is watching TV/Video whilst doing another activity (e.g. cleaning the house, or just pottering around like an old man on a Sunday) and they want the same media to be playing in two rooms.

3) Two kids want to watch the same show in their own bedrooms without having asynchronous sound disturbing each other.

A good idea?
Achievable?

 

[tourettes]

On theory level it would be cool, but when it comes to the implementation level it wont be so cool - syncing different PCs to output audio and/or video with 5 ms accuracy will be a huge pita. If you are playing audio with more than 5 ms difference it will start to create annoying delay effect. Not to mention that different audio HW clocks on different PCs will be running freely so you will end up in some really slow phaser effect when the clocks are slowly drifting away (1 second in few hours for example is quite possible).

 

[robbo100]

Fair point.

Although I believe that XBMC have such a plugin (for music only though I think).

I am sure that a man of your coding prowess could manage it.....

 

[robbo100]

At around this time of the year (just before my annual Christmas drinks party), I think about this thread, because I still think this would be a nice feature. It would be great to be able to broadcast audio to different clients simultaneously. So far, the only solution I have is to use "TeamViewer" (VNC type thing) with shared audio, which is not very good!

Browsing on the net today, I found the following software: http://jackaudio.org, which looks like just the thing.

It strikes me that since this has an API, it would be fairly easy to implement into MP (clearly by someone much cleverer than me ).

P.S. I knew if I waited long enough my Avatar would come back into fashion! I can't believe I never got round to changing it after last Christmas!