Show HN: I built a simple web app for streaming videos

Show HN: I built a simple web app for streaming videos(peer-flix.herokuapp.com)

127 points by anxiostial 5 years ago | 55 comments

anxiostial 5 years ago |

So the idea is that you select a file, create a room and then share the URL with anyone you want to join and then the video is streamed to everyone connected. All communication between occupants is peer to peer, the room creator has the video controls and any action is relayed to all peers. I built this thing in my spare time because it seemed like a fun idea to be able to stream a video file between a group of friends and it is very much a first pass, things will be broken, features missing, etc. I do plan on expanding it further when I have more spare time but please do comment with any feedback, roast it if you like.

ignoramous 5 years ago | |

https://www.comeover.io/ is similar I take, but only that it is built on top of webtorrent instead.

anxiostial 5 years ago | | |

well so is this haha, yea functionally its basically the same app right now, but like I said though I do want to expand it a lot, this was very much a POC for me.

crtasm 5 years ago | | |

OP doesn't embed googlesyndication+googletagmanager, so that's a plus for me.

iconjack 5 years ago | |

This is a cool idea. I did give it a spin and found that the fidelity between viewers was not all that true. For example, if I pause the video (as the room creator), the video gets paused for other viewers as expected, but not in the same place. In other words, not all viewers are in sync.

anxiostial 5 years ago | | |

yea so there is a "drift threshold" of 2 seconds, and my thinking for this is that instead of having the frames jump around many times when we go out of sync it would be preferable to allow for some difference between peers to reduce the number of times we need to sync up.

samtimalsina 5 years ago | |

Sounds like a cool idea, wish there was a demo room without uploading a file. Can you talk a little bit about how the video is handled on the server? What steps do you take to keep the file secure and protect the privacy of the users?

anxiostial 5 years ago | | |

the server does not actually ever receive any part of the video, it is peer to peer (webrtc).

anxiostial 5 years ago | | |

and regarding a public room, just uncheck the private boolean when creating a room, it will then show up for everyone at: https://peer-flix.herokuapp.com/.

although public rooms are kinda pointless right now because once you close your browser the room is basically dead and is not being cleaned up atm.

aero-glide 5 years ago | |

Very useful. Better than using screen-sharing in MS Teams (which has really choppy fps)

m-p-3 5 years ago | | |

Same in Jitsi Meet. One workaround I found for the video choppiness (at the expense of image quality) is to present the video file as a virtual webcam using OBS Studio.

https://github.com/Fenrirthviti/obs-virtual-cam/releases

sufyanadam 5 years ago |

This is great. Nice work! I built something really similar about 3 years ago, a few months before my 4th child was born. Then I lost interest lol. Super barebones POC https://justwatchwith.me/ The idea was that you could stream videos directly from your machine and watch in sync with remote friends and family, controlling the playback with a pause button. I didn't maintain it for a while after I built the POC because not many of my friends / family were very interested at the time. If I only had more time to improve it..... they probably would've appreciated it more under current circumstances if I continued to work on it lol

anxiostial 5 years ago | |

cool, and yea I am not sure if people would want something like this at all, it just seemed like a fun idea to me.

codethief 5 years ago |

Hmm videos don't seem to be working in Firefox. The loading animation with the blue bricks goes on and on and on…

The only thing I see on the JS console is "asm.js type error: initializer of exported object literal must be name of function" but I suppose this is not it?

anxiostial 5 years ago | |

yea so I should have clarified, when a room creator closes the tab, the room is basically dead, anyone who enters will never connect or see anything. This basically makes public rooms completely useless so I may remove them for now (possibly forever).

cvhashim 5 years ago |

I love the idea. I have a ton of questions. How would you prevent someone from sharing explicit, harmful or illegal content? Or is this an “anything goes” sort of platform? Is there chat functionality with room participants?

Also I wonder if a similar sort of platform exists for Live events/Sports? Sort of like watching a live sporting event (NBA, champions league) with friends in a chat room?

anxiostial 5 years ago | |

There is nothing preventing bad content atm, and I may look into this, but with it being largely client side (peer to peer) I have a feeling that will be tricky and obviously anyone knowing what they are doing could get around the safeguards.

There is no chat functionality but yea that is very high on my list of todos.

Not sure, I have never come across anything like that but I feel like its something people would like, especially considering most people have been locked in doors more often than usual lately.

summitsummit 5 years ago | | |

is this uses torrents, does that mean there's a possibility i might get a notice for uploading illegal content if i watch like a marvel movie i uploaded with just a couple of my friends?

nixgeek 5 years ago |

Ran into no support for mobile devices? Out of interest, what’s the technical challenge governing what seems to be an allowlist of screen resolutions you support?

“Apologies, unfortunately this application does not support your screen resolution (yet).“

anxiostial 5 years ago | |

I believe it is largely time related, I did not want a broken UI and prefer adaptive UIs, I will look into adding mobile support at some point.

valboa 5 years ago |

This! I think we are needing something similar to podcasts for video, that will remove the incumbent players (youtube) from being the sole owners of the video content and instead they are one of many distributors.

holler 5 years ago | |

curious what you mean by that? can’t you already either use existing video or download your videos? what about IG, tiktok, etc? feels like short-form video is pretty ubiquitous these days

NiceWayToDoIT 5 years ago |

I tried joining this one https://peer-flix.herokuapp.com/3ef2c597-f30b-49ac-bdcc-bac7...

but nothing is happening just 2 blue boxes spinning ?

sebmellen 5 years ago |

Do you have a lot of experience working with WebRTC/WebTorrents? I would appreciate if you'd reach out via my company email (listed in my profile). I can't find any contact information for you on your page.

pawsed 5 years ago |

This is pretty fancy, I looked around and it's straight forward too. Do you think you'll explore the idea of sync viewing and chats so on so forth?

anxiostial 5 years ago | |

Thanks, so what do you mean by sync viewing? right now everyone is synced to the room creator, which is the only user with controls, and obviously it is super simple / restricted but works for a POC.

Yes, very much, chat is probably the next big feature I would tackle.

FR10 5 years ago |

Good job, it works pretty well. I see you are using WebRTC and WebTorrent, so I assume that this scales well, do you have any stats you can share?

anxiostial 5 years ago | |

I deployed it a few hours ago so sorry no haha but yea it is almost entirely peer to peer so it should. I don't really have any kind of analytics in place anyways.

ShamelessC 5 years ago | | |

What's your experience been like with WebRTC? I've been playing games and watching shows with Jitsi and Discord with friends. The lower latency is fantastic.

I've been looking for a self hosted (or p2p) solution for streaming to a large audience e.g. Twitch but with WebRTC instead of HLS/DASH/rtmp. Are you aware of anything like that?

feross 5 years ago | | |

WebTorrent creator here :) Cool use of WebTorrent!

ghostbrainalpha 5 years ago |

How long after sharing this with hacker news did it take for one of us to name their public room "penis"?

anxiostial 5 years ago | |

it was within the first hour

arxv33 5 years ago |

Can you detail the technology stack a little more? Like how you are using webrtc and webtorrent?

WrtCdEvrydy 5 years ago |

Yeah, this is fancy.

anxiostial 5 years ago | |

thanks.

solrflow 5 years ago |

Open source?

anxiostial 5 years ago | |

no but probably will be, mostly not making it public right now because it isn't a pretty project to look at atm.

adictator 5 years ago |

If you could not use WebTorrent, how would you have built this?

anxiostial 5 years ago | |

It would have certainly been a lot of work to do that custom, but I would have used webrtc for that as well. I certainly would not have implemented a torrent client myself, which is something that is nice to have as a library, because adding support for creating a room with a magnet uri instead of a local file would be trivial now.