My wife and I, we watch almost everything together — movies, TV shows, even YouTube videos.

This can be challenging during travel since we prefer to watch our own content instead of that provided by the airline. Watching on a single iPad with shared headphones is not a great experience.

I'm thinking of an app to fix this issue which allows us to watch the same content on two different devices, but synced.

Not sure if this helps anybody but us? Anybody else find this useful?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and have been hoping somebody else would fix it (like Apple VisionPro) but not sure that’ll happen …

So I’m going to take a stab at fixing it myself 🙂

#Entertainment #Sharing #iOS #macOS #Coding

@f Apple has SharePlay via FaceTime. I have not tested if it works in situations like on a plane but could be worth testing.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/shareplay-watch-listen-play-iphb657eb791/ios

@Rycaut Yep, aware of SharePlay, but if I’m not mistaken, it’s pretty limited if you don’t have Internet access. I believe this might have changed with iOS 17 (I vaguely remember a conversation I had with somebody about this after WWDC) but I haven’t bothered to check it out yet …

Should do that soon though, thanks for the reminder 🙂

Also, FaceTime is blocked in certain countries (like the UAE) so that you can’t use it for video calls. So I’m not sure how that ties into the SharePlay part of it … Guess I’ll find out …

@f I’m curious - I wonder if it can work without internet access (ie just on a shared local networks) if that also gets around any regional restrictions on FaceTime video calls?

Now I’m also kinda curious if anyone makes a device to easily create a small wifi network that isn’t a hotspot that fails if not connected to the internet (ie so your devices might all act like they are on the same network) (seems like from there syncing video is an app that can share screens across your devices)

@Rycaut Since my memory is failing me (😛) I couldn’t remember what the change to SharePlay was this year. So went back through my old posts just now and realized that you can now (supposedly) start SharePlay sessions over AirDrop! That would be interesting to try and as soon as I have two iOS 17 devices (and provided the feature is available now) I want to try that out and see if the lack of Internet access affects things.

As for your suggestion about a small WiFi network, that’s there already with multiplier connectivity 🙂 You can connect multiple iOS/macOS devices without a network to chat, watch videos, or to transfer files. That’s what I’m using to implement my idea …

Just not sure if that’s good enough speed-wise though since I’ve not had enough time to test this yet. The basic idea works, and I’ve gotten file transfers working too. Am working on chat at the moment, but I really need to do more testing …

Oh yeah, in case you’re interested, the SharePlay session from this year that probably has the info (I forget now if I even watched it) is this one:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10239/

@f what does shared headphones mean here? How many headphones are we talking?

@Alexbbrown I meant using the shared audio feature of AirPods. The audio sharing wasn't the issue though since that's much improved over using a hardware splitter with the shared audio feature 🙂

The issue is using a single iPad between the two of us for the same content.

Ideally, what I wanted was to be able to watch the same content on two devices (without WiFi, so SharePlay might be out .. though I'm still looking into it) and have the playback synced. This should also lend to being able to use devices like the XReal glasses to get a much bigger screen/display but still have synced playback ... At least, that's the dream 🙂

I know this is a long answer for the headphone question 😛 As far as headphones go, our current solution only works for two. But the solution I'm working on should work for more than two as well ...