[michaeljbishop]

I set this up in the most hacky way 10 years ago with my girlfriend. We would watch dvds together and I wanted to synchronize them (especially important for comedies)

My setup? An app that would monitor DVD Player for events while listening to events over iChat using AppleScript.

If someone paused or played the DVD, the moitoring process would notice the event, make a JSON payload representing the action including the local timestamp, and use AppleScript to post an iChat message. Then, the process on the other side, would see the special iChat message (forwarded via AppleScript), and apply the action to the local DVD player process, taking into account the difference between the sent timestamp and the local timestamp.

It worked like a charm and made watching movies so much more fun. We always had iChat open anyway so it seemed like an easy win to piggy back on that, no server needed.

An inelegant hack, but it worked.

[Feuilles_Mortes]

This is pretty clever, I like it!