Re: [Firebase] Firebase YouTube application (YouBase..catchy hey!)

[Michael "Kato" Wulf]

James, looks like a blast. I know some ladies who would love this (should I tell them about it?).

One thing that wasn't intuitive: I went straight to youtube, picked out a favorite vid, copied the URL, then went to your spiffy new app and tried to figure out where to plug in the URL to watch it.

Seems like I'm forced to search for it there? I'm guessing if I'm sharing a vid, I've already found it, so easier to use a link?

Also, to really make this useful, consider a browser plugin that puts a button on youtube "share with friends" sort of thing.

Great work on this.

Cheers!

On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:23 AM, James Hooker <seidr...@googlemail.com> wrote:

I just thought I'd share what I've come up with while using Firebase.

For ages I've had the idea (ok, I know this is NOW not an original idea, but it was a number of years ago when I first thought of it!) of creating an interface that would allow people to watch YouTube videos in-sync with others, so when I got invited to test Firebase I thought 'what a perfect opportunity to make this idea a reality!'.

This app allows users to 'join rooms' using a unique URL (a new one can be generated by visiting the sites main URL), which they can then share with others. Once in the room, users can search for videos, pause / rewind / seek the video that's playing. Anything that one user does is replicated on all other users view of the app. Videos are synced up pretty well, although there could be room for improvement.

Users can also chat to others using the chat bar. A nickname is chosen when a user first visits the site.

Anyway, would love some feedback. I know the UI still needs a little tweaking (the control bar for one needs to be dynamic, changing as the user status changes).

You can find the app here: http://g0blin.co.uk/ytbase/

Thanks to the Firebase team for providing us with such a cool - and easy to use - platform for real-time communication on the browser! :)

James H

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[Michael "Kato" Wulf]

A couple more observations--I've had quite a bit of fun playing with this.

It auto-starts when I find a video. It should probably wait for me to click play since I'm probably going to then invite my buds to come watch too.

As you ease into ideas for enhancements, consider an "invite friends" link/button right on the page that I could use to automagically™  shoot an email/sms/im(?) to friends.

I hope these ideas are helpful; it's great to see what others are building!

[Andrew Lee]

Very cool James!

I agree with Michael that it's a little tricky to find videos. Perhaps you should make it so I can take any YouTube URL and turn it into a synchronized viewing experience just by changing the domain name. For example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

becomes:

http://www.syncyoutube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

Best -

-Andrew

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Andrew Lee

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[James Hooker]

Heya,

Thanks for the great suggestions, agree with all of them! I'll look into implementing them in the next couple of days :)

Love the idea of the browser plugin! I've never looked into making plugins for browsers, but it's definitely something I'll consider.

Thanks again, and I'll keep you posted :)

Kind regards,

James H

[Justin Wilcox]

From HN today, start a chrome extension in 15 seconds: http://extensionizr.com/

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[Michael "Kato" Wulf]

And you can write Firefox extensions in JavaScript (they have a great dev tool in place for this) so they are cake. Particularly if you went with the (utterly brilliant) idea Andrew suggested and make URLs work in-place.

[Jonas Schmid]

Great idea!

One thing that struck me directly is that it does not wait for the videos to be downloaded.

I opened two private navigation windows and navigated somewhere in the video. 

Since my connection is crappy, one video began directly and the other started 5 seconds later. There was a lag of 5 seconds between the two.

It would be nice to have the tool wait for the slowest connection to complete before really playing the video.

Anyway, when you release something nice, you'll always have people complaining have how you should have done it differently. This was just an idea.

Cheers

Jonas 

[justin kruger]

Great Idea, i'd love to see where it goes.  It's kinda like google hangouts.

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[Stephen Guerin]

Nice, James.

In a similar use case, we've experimented with sync reveal.js presentations. eg:

Presenter loads a presentation

  http://acequia.io/reveal/CityKnowledge/remotePresenter.html

and invites multiple viewers to load:

  http://acequia.io/reveal/CityKnowledge/remoteViewer.html

Of course it needs unique tokens per presentation room/channel. Maybe using a temp number like join.me does with screen sharing.

On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:23 AM, James Hooker <seidr...@googlemail.com> wrote:

I just thought I'd share what I've come up with while using Firebase.

For ages I've had the idea (ok, I know this is NOW not an original idea, but it was a number of years ago when I first thought of it!) of creating an interface that would allow people to watch YouTube videos in-sync with others, so when I got invited to test Firebase I thought 'what a perfect opportunity to make this idea a reality!'.

This app allows users to 'join rooms' using a unique URL (a new one can be generated by visiting the sites main URL), which they can then share with others. Once in the room, users can search for videos, pause / rewind / seek the video that's playing. Anything that one user does is replicated on all other users view of the app. Videos are synced up pretty well, although there could be room for improvement.

Users can also chat to others using the chat bar. A nickname is chosen when a user first visits the site.

Anyway, would love some feedback. I know the UI still needs a little tweaking (the control bar for one needs to be dynamic, changing as the user status changes).

You can find the app here: http://g0blin.co.uk/ytbase/

Thanks to the Firebase team for providing us with such a cool - and easy to use - platform for real-time communication on the browser! :)

James H

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[James Hooker]

Hey Jonas,

I've attempted to do just that by making all clients wait until everyone in the current session has a status of '2' (paused). This seemed to be the most reliable way of making sure all users had buffered the initial part of the video and was ready to begin playback. It could probably do with tweaking a bit more, so I'll look into that.

Thanks for the feedback :)

James H

[James Hooker]

Hey Stephen,

Very cool - there are so many good uses for Firebase in the area of collaborative / interactivity across multiple clients! Thanks for sharing your work :)

James H