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My significant other and I want to watch recorded TV shows together. Problem is: we live a few hundred kilometers apart and only see each other on the weekends, which we want to use for seeing mutual friends or going out.

So, we thought about watching the shows simultaneously while having a Skype call running so we can hear each others snarky comments on the shows.

My question is: Are there any tools that could help us in synchronizing playback on two different machines (Macs)? Our fallback would be to just hit "play" at the same time but that doesn't seem very precise.

Another problem would be the sound feedback through Skype. We don't want to hear the audio from the shows in there. That would probably create weird echoes.

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Cute :-) I'd save the trouble and go for the manual "play button" option : you can likely reach <1 second precision which seems good enough. Synchronize on your computers' clock (which are configured with NTP synchronization ?).

Regarding the (probable) sound echo issue, are you watching the shows on your computers or on TV ? Using headphones would be a solution provided you're watching the shows from your computer, otherwise it could get trickier (a very directional microphone, or from a headset ?).

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  • Computers using NTP should have clocks within a few ms of each other. However, you might notice that your recordings are off by a few seconds, depending on how you each recorded them. As long as you aren't hearing each other's TVs, this won't be a big issue.
    – Kevin Panko
    Oct 21, 2014 at 15:03
  • We'd use the exact same video file to avoid that.
    – selfawaresoup
    Oct 21, 2014 at 15:25

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