is there a way to watch pirated shows/movies together?
so is it possible to watch pirated shows and movies together over the internet? me and my friends cant meet up because we're hours away from eachother.
Since Jellyfin v10.6.0, it's had a feature called SyncPlay allowing multiple users to watch the same thing at the same time (coordinates pauses, fast forwarding/rewinding, and all that between clients). I've used it and it worked like a charm, although I did find that not all clients support it.
Can confirm group-watching with Plex. I did this quite a few times with some friends during the darkest initial pandemic times and it's a great way to connect with distant friends. I also recommend, as someone mentioned, a simultaneous discord chat. We exclusively watched horrible movies and MST3K'd the shit out of them.
Except Plex insanely makes you stream it to each person, instead of letting people download and sync streaming. So good luck doing it with more than two people unless you're watching a 1080p movie on a beast with an amazing Internet connection.
plex let's you choose the target bitrate. 1080p can be done at 8Mbps so a cable connection with 30Mbps up could do 3 with some spare room. like yeah if you are rural or just stuck with dsl.
but generally people with their own media library to share have okish net
Discord streaming is the way. Most of my friends don't care about super high quality either so a little compression doesn't hurt. Plus there are ways to bypass the 720p restrictions, too.
You can use https://watchparty.me as long as your upstream bandwidth is fast enough for amount of friends * bitrate, or you can selfhost it or get a premium account so their servers stream your file (so you only have to have bandwidth for a single stream yourself).
WatchParty works fine for watching YouTube together but uploading to your friends requires Chrome. I've also never been able to get video working with mkv files. Webm works but I've never seen a release in a webm container.
We mostly use discord since it's difficult to convince people to sign up for new services.. Have to do a workaround to stream desktop audio on Linux, since their client still only supports that for Windows, but other than that it usually works.
Tried https://twoseven.xyz/ a few times during a period when Discord streaming was lagging a lot. It supports desktop streaming with a browser plugin, and sync watching on various streaming services. As far as I can remember it worked ok but had a few issues, though that was a while ago so those might've been fixed.
If you really want to jump through hoops, do it in VRchat. Their biggest worlds are movie worlds. I've spent a 1000 hours in that game just watching movies for free with friends.