Control VLC remotely over the net?
November 6, 2011 1:56 PM   Subscribe

Can I keep two instances of VLC (on separate computers) playing the same video (stored locally on both) in sync, by controlling just one of them?

In other words, I want to be able to play/pause/skip VLC on one computer, and have the other computer stay in sync as well. They both have a local copy of the video, and they're both on the internet, but not on the same LAN so streaming isn't an option.

Both computers are Macs.
posted by Mwongozi to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've fiddled with the netsync module in VLC, but only with streaming video. I suspect it might work for locally-played video if they're truly identical (i.e. the exact same video, so that all the internal timestamps, data frame sizes & alignments, etc are the same) , but I'm not sure.

If you use it over the 'net, you'd have to contend with NAT'ing, port forwarding, firewall rules, etc, to make them see each other - but you're going to have to do that whatever the final solution is.
posted by Pinback at 2:15 PM on November 6, 2011


Just out of curiosity, what's your purpose in doing this?

A friend of mine and I, separated by the Atlantic Ocean, wanted to watch tv shows together on VLC while video chatting on Skype. We came up with a low tech solution.
posted by Mercaptan at 3:13 PM on November 6, 2011


VLC has a telnet interface, so you could cook up a script that takes each command and sends it to both instances of VLC. Not sure how you could get around unpredictable latency if you need more than ~quarter-second precision.
Interacting with just one of the instances of VLC would put them out of sync.
posted by Tzarius at 4:35 AM on November 8, 2011


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