There are a lot of movie night chat room, but none of them supports m3u8! Let me fix that...

Intros

Why? A lot of great free resource is using m3u8 for example here and under Shelter In Place orders, keeping social distance and watching these along with friends remotely is highly demanded!

Scope

Users are mostly my UIowa Alumni friends (no more than 8 concurrent users). Scale is not issue at all even if we host on one single old machine. Heroku is free!

Quick Hack

So my target is to finish it asap.

After 30min search, I found Vynchronize comes to my sight... Yeah, it's old js app likely 2008ish which means almost no common js framework and tooling. But you know, hacker doesn't care about that.

If we have a player that can play the m3u8 then we just need a bit adaptation for the player. Oh, luckily we just found one: DPlayer!

Html5 player in this app is very similar to DPlayer interface wise. So for quick hack, I changed the media which is original html5 video object to dplayer object. The only difference of both interfaces are loading new video switchVideo() and seek(time). This way, we keep the minimum code changes.

After 1 hr's reading and writing, changes are done and movie is synchronized! Then just 10 min to deploy it as a Heroku app. I'm totally satisfied with the time spent on this today.

Here's my mod code, welcome to deploy it for your friends! If you do, don't forget to star it as well!