Ease

Ease is a desktop application with the goal of making it a little bit easier watch movies with the people that matter to you, regardless of the distance.

Ease lets you broadcast your own local content to your friends and loved ones, completely in sync! All the audio and video sharing is peer-to-peer, ensuring your content stays private and safe, and we only use a small signaling server to help you discover other users.

In sync... what does this really mean for you? Well, if you click pause, it pauses for everyone. If you seek, it seeks for everyone. Best of all, everyone watching can do these things too! All the content is completely synced, allowing for a more personal experience (and avoiding the good old "3... 2... 1... Play!").

If you are looking for a similar experience for remote content (youtube etc), we suggest looking at Gaze or Rabb.it, both are great products!

WeSync

While Ease is still under active development, it is no longer being done in this repository. Due to the experimental API being added to Chrome as a permanent feature, with Firefox soon to follow, we will be redoing Ease as a pure web application using Vue.js. You can find more information here

Web Client

We have developed a web application for Ease, but unfortunately is only available for the client. If you're hosting, we are afraid you are stuck with the electron app for now.

You can use the web application here

Technical

For the more technical minded out there, Ease is using an experimental chromium feature to extract a stream from an HTML5 video element, and stream it to the viewers via WebRTC. All controls will be synced via this WebRTC connection as well, ensuring you stay off the grid! Normally you can't count on all viewers using experimental features, but thanks to Electron we can control how you use the application while still offering a native, cross-platform experience.

Feature Request

If you want to see more features, please open an issue with the Feature Request tag, and we will be happy to take a look

Getting Started Developing

Clone

• Start by cloning the directory from the repo (https://github.com/Right2Drive/ease), or your forked repo

  • git clone https://github.com/Right2Drive/ease

• And navigate to the project:

  • cd ease

Setup

• Ensure you have NodeJS installed (you can get this here)

• Run the setup script:

  • npm run setup

• Note: Linux users may need to add sudo permissions

Building

• We have created an npm script to build Typescript and Webpack, simply run:

  • npm run build or npm run rebuild to rebuild

• There are also some other file watchers setup for your convenience. These commands are:

  • npm run watch:wp and npm run watch:ts

• Having this many file watchers is ridiculous though. Don't worry, we've got you covered! The following script runs all watchers concurrently so you don't have to stress!

  • npm run watch

Running Application

• Once again there is a fancy npm script to the rescue! (PS: It's not that fancy)

  • npm start

Running Tests

• Electron applications run in two kinds of processes, the 'Main' and 'Render" processes. Each must be tested differently.

  • We use colons : to separate packages, so it should be relatively intuitive running the various tests. For example, to run the peer unit tests in ./test/unit/render/peer, the command is:

    • npm run test:unit:render:peer

  • You can also run a superset of the tests. For example to run all the unit tests, it's just a matter of running:

    • npm run test:unit

  • We greatly appreciate any effort to add tests to the project, but ask that you please follow this pattern

Debugging Tests

• All the tests for each directory have a debug command as well. Simply append -debug to the end of the npm command. For example:

  • npm run test:unit:render:peer-debug

• We do not currently have scripts setup a superset of directories, such as test/unit, as we are not sure what this would accomplish anyways.

Main Process

• Tests run in the main process (which includes any structures that do not necessarily need a DOM to function, such as src/render/peer/*) can be debugged using the method above to run the tests in debug mode.

• If you are using vscode, you can find an example launch.json here that should get you up and running. We will try to keep this updated

• If you are using some other editor/IDE, unfortunately right now you'll have to figure it out for yourself. Feel free to share your configurations with us, and we can add links in the README

Render Process

• Tests run in the render process (such as src/render/pages/*) are easier to debug. Simply run the debug command and an electron shell will open with the devtools open. Set your breakpoints where you'd like, and press CTRL-r to reload the page (which will also restart the tests).

Issues

• Feel free to open any issues you find here

• The project uses ZenHub for issue tracking, so if you want to see a more detailed overview of where the project is you can download the extension (free) here

Thanks

• A huge thanks to all the open source projects that have made this possible, Ease is our way of giving back ❤️