Watch your own videos with your friends — in perfect sync, in the browser, on your own server.
Someone drops a video in, everyone gets the same picture at the same moment. Pause it, come back tomorrow, and it picks up exactly where you left off.
Watch Together is a tiny self-hosted watch-party server for your own video files.
No accounts, no sign-up, no streaming service in the middle. Start it, send a link to your friends, and everyone lands in the same room watching the same video at the same second — whether they're in the next room or on the other side of the country.
It's built for the simple case: "I have this video on my disk, let's watch it together tonight."
🤖 This project was generated by AI — written by Claude, directed and reviewed by a human.
Rooms have no size limit. Everybody who opens the link joins instantly — no account, no invite, no e-mail address. Pick a name and you're in.
Every room has its own URL. Copy it, paste it into your chat, done. If the room doesn't exist yet, it's created the moment the first person walks in.
One person leads, everyone else follows automatically. Play, pause and seeking are shared instantly.
If someone drifts a little out of step, their player quietly speeds up or slows down by 20% until they're back in line — no visible jump, no "3, 2, 1, play!" countdown. Only when the gap gets really big does it snap to the right spot and say so.
Switch to another video and the room waits: a badge counts who already has it buffered, and playback starts by itself the moment everyone is ready — including when one video ends and the next one comes up. Impatient? Whoever holds the controls can hit play and it starts straight away, however far along the others are.
There's no fixed host — but at any moment exactly one person holds the controls, and the viewer list shows who. Everyone else sees play, pause, the ten-second jumps and the timeline greyed out; pressing them says what's missing instead of stopping the film for the whole room. One click on Take control and they're yours.
Whoever holds the controls can start a livestream instead of playing a video — their screen (and, if they allow it, its audio) goes out to everyone in the room over WebRTC, no dedicated TURN server required. A Live badge appears on the picture, the viewer list swaps everyone's position for a green or red dot showing whether their stream connection is up, and playback controls grey out since there's nothing to pause or seek in a live picture. Drops and reconnects on its own if the connection hiccups.
See Screen sharing for how it's built.
Alongside the web app, each room is reachable under a fixed
/stream/<room>.m3u8 URL — for a TV, Chromecast, OBS, or any regular video
player, no browser required. It shows exactly what the room is doing: a
video at its current playback position, a live screen share, or a paused
picture when nothing is playing. A small, purpose-built background service
joins a room the moment someone requests its stream and leaves again once
nobody's watching — the stream itself never stutters or drops, even while
what's behind it changes.
See HLSStream for how it's built.
Switch the ready check on and a video change works like a lobby in a game: a striped overlay lies over the picture with one big button in the middle, red until you're ready and green once you are, and the viewer list colours everyone the same way. Playback starts by itself the moment the last person is ready.
The same goes for walking into a room that still has a video sitting at the very start — that one hasn't been watched yet either, so it waits for the room. Come back to a film you left halfway through and it simply picks up where it was, no waiting.
Otherwise the check stays out of the way: pausing and resuming during a video is unaffected, and dropping your mark mid-film doesn't stop anything, it just holds up the next one. Off by default; when it's off, nothing about it is visible.
Clicking the picture does not pause — one stray click would stop the film for everyone. Play and pause live in the control bar and nowhere else, the keyboard has no hold on the video at all, and a click on the video just says so.
Double-click or F11 switches to full screen, where the title and the controls
lay themselves over the picture and fade away again after five quiet seconds.
Hovering the timeline names the moment under the pointer, two buttons jump ten
seconds either way, and one more gives the video the full width by moving the
viewer list and the queue underneath it.
Stop halfway through a movie, close the tab, go to bed. When someone opens the room again, the video is waiting at exactly the position you left it — paused, ready to go.
Videos go up in small pieces, so there's no 2 GB wall, no PHP upload limit to tune, nothing to configure. A 30 GB movie works the same as a 2-minute clip.
You get a real progress bar with speed and time remaining, and you can upload several files at once. Want to keep watching while it uploads? Minimize the dialog — the progress keeps ticking away in the corner.
Uploads appear in everyone's queue while they're still uploading, with progress and the name of whoever's adding them. Each entry shows a thumbnail, its runtime and who brought it. Anyone can pick what plays next or remove something.
When a video finishes, the next one starts automatically.
Three things every room decides for itself, and everyone in it sees the change straight away.
Keep the videos. Normally a video is deleted the moment it has run through. Turn that off and it simply stays in the queue — and that room survives a restart of the service too, as long as videos are left in it. This only postpones deletion, though: a kept room that sits empty for more than 4 hours is deleted anyway.
Ready check. Off by default. Turn it on and a video change waits for the whole room, as described above.
Opening and ending. Give the room a time for the end of the opening and one for the start of the ending, and a fresh video starts behind its intro and counts as finished as soon as the credits begin. Handy for a series: an evening of episodes without the same theme song eight times over. Leave the fields empty and nothing changes.
The viewer list shows every person in the room and their exact position in the video, plus a marker on the timeline. Anyone lagging behind is highlighted, so you can see at a glance if someone's connection is struggling.
And when a connection doesn't just struggle but dies, the room notices: every browser sends a quiet heartbeat, and whoever goes silent for ten seconds is taken out of the list. No ghosts left sitting there holding up the next video.
Under the player, a small table records the moves that matter — started, paused, switched, added, removed — with the time and who did it. It lives entirely in your browser: nothing is stored on the server, and it starts empty the moment you join, so it only ever shows what happened while you were there.
Everything is synced except the sound. Turn it down, mute it, crank it up — it only affects you, and your browser remembers it for next time.
One click on the theme icon cycles through three looks: bright light, a soft dim grey for evenings when full dark feels like too much, and true dark for movie-night black. The interface also follows your system theme and your browser language out of the box, and you can override either. Your choices are remembered locally.
Can't come up with a room name? The app suggests some. Rooms get everyday objects
(Kugelschreiber43, Uhr12), people get fruit (Erdbeere93, Banane33).
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| Dark mode | Light mode |
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| Joining a room — a name is all it takes | |
Everything runs in one container. No database to set up, no volume to mount, no reverse proxy needed to get going.
git clone https://github.com/WeslieDE/OpenWatchTogether.git
cd OpenWatchTogether
docker build -t watch-together .
docker run --rm -p 8080:80 \
-p 42000:42000/tcp \
-p 42000:42000/udp \
-e WT_SFU_ANNOUNCED_IP=your.server.ip \
watch-togetherOpen http://localhost:8080, pick a room name, pick your name — done. Send the URL from your address bar to whoever should join.
The extra 42000 port and WT_SFU_ANNOUNCED_IP are for screen sharing — set
the variable to your server's public IP (or 127.0.0.1 when just trying it out
on your own machine). Without it, everything else works fine, only the
livestream feature won't connect for anyone outside your machine.
📖 Full setup guide → Docker Compose, reverse proxy & HTTPS, manual PHP installation, every configuration option, technical details and troubleshooting.
Everything is deleted when the service restarts — on purpose. A watch party leaves no trace: no disk slowly filling up, no volume to mount, no backups to think about. As long as the service keeps running, your room stays exactly as you left it, including the spot you paused at. The one exception is a room you explicitly told to keep its videos — and even that only buys it 4 extra hours once it sits empty. → Details
Formats: anything the browser plays directly — MP4, WebM, OGG — uploads straight away. MKV, AVI and MP3 are converted to MP4 in the browser first (MP3 gets a static cover image as its video track), desktop only. → Details
Privacy: videos are renamed to random names and served straight from the web server (not through PHP), under a URL that's hard to guess but not access-controlled. Your name, theme and volume never leave your browser.
Under the hood: one HTML page, a plain PHP API for uploads and rooms, and a long-running PHP process handling the live connection over WebSockets. → Details
Is there really no file size limit?
Correct. Uploads are split into chunks, so PHP's upload_max_filesize never gets
in the way. Set WT_MAX_BYTES if you want a limit for your installation.
Can I cancel an upload? Any time — individually or all at once, and the queue entry disappears for everyone.
Can I require a password to upload or start a livestream?
Yes — set -e WT_PASSWORD=yourpassword. Watching stays open for everyone
regardless; the password only gates adding videos and going live.
Do I need accounts or a database server? Neither. No login, no PostgreSQL, no Redis — just the container.
Does it work on a phone? Yes, the interface adapts. Mobile browsers still need one manual tap to start playback the first time.
Can we watch YouTube or Netflix together? No — this is for your own video files, not for streaming services.
How many people fit in a room? There's no built-in limit. What matters is your server's upload bandwidth, since everyone streams the video from it.
Issues and pull requests are welcome. If you're reporting a sync problem, it helps a lot to mention your browser, how many people were in the room, and whether you're running behind a reverse proxy.
MIT — do whatever you like with it: use it, change it, share it, ship it. Provided as is, without any warranty.
Made for movie nights that shouldn't need a countdown. 🎬