Watch Locally

This project is under construction...

Preface

This is a watch party website. Is it like the others? No.
There are many alternatives, yet the majority of them suffers from the same recurring issues, such as:

• poor performance (laggy sliders, stuttery animations)
• poor design choices or silly limitations
• plenty of bugs and issues which, if reported, are usually ignored, swept aside and never resolved
• no backwards support (nowadays web developers can barely support the latest browser release)
• chromium only (because other browser engines don't exist)
• slow backends written in JS or other scripting languages
• little to no support for mobile devices (no progress bar, no subtitles, extension-based)
• glaring synchronization issues across multiple clients
• lack of server-side support for bypassing CORS

The goals of this project

• open-source
• cross-browser compatibility
• cross-device compatibility (quality experience for mobile users, hence the name - pocket)
• compatibility with older browsers (4 years back)
• minimal dependencies
• no JS frameworks
• avoiding needlessly complicated or bloated code (let's keep it sane)
• fighting around browser-specific quirks (lack of standardized slider customization, cues stacking)
• creating a custom player which can distinguish between user-initiated and programmatic playback amongst other things

Prerequisites

• Go version 1.21 (released 2023-08-08) or newer (supporting slices)
• Any browser supporting ECMAScript6 (2015), preferably newer than 2020

Components

• hls
• pocket-picker
• subtitle-downloader
• pocket-yt
• pocket-player (integrated, needs a repository)

Running

Adjust the build script corresponding to your platform by setting -ip and -port arguments. Then execute it:

Windows

build.bat

Linux

./build.sh

https - How to generate SSL keys

In order to secure incoming and outgoing traffic TLS is crucial

openssl req -newkey rsa:4096  -x509  -sha512  -days 365 -nodes -out certificate.pem -keyout privatekey.pem

Git comes with many preinstalled binaries among which is openssl
On Windows it can be found at Git/usr/bin/openssl.exe where Git is git's root installation directory

Additionally, to have your domain verified you can use a free certificate authority like: https://letsencrypt.org