Long-Distance Movie Night

2015-09-26

In a long-distance relationship? I currently am, and it sucks, but that will change someday. My SO (significant other), who is an ocean away and five hours ahead, and I were recently celebrating the passing of time and wanted to share a movie night. How were we to do this?

There are many options out there that we explored, such as Gaze, which has a great design (though a questionably shaky platform), but only supports .mp4, .ogg and .woff files (even if you alter the webpage to accept all file types). We had our movie in .avi and .mov, so this wasn’t going to work.

We also tried a few other services but to no avail, so we put our thinking caps on and solved the problem with these simple steps:

  1. Make sure you and your SO each have a copy of the movie (sharing it via Dropbox is a big help here)
  2. Use Skype to video call your SO
  3. Open wine
  4. Do a countdown (3…2…1) for when each of you should click play
  5. Turn on the mute button when you’re not talking/commenting so that his/her movie’s sound doesn’t come over the speakers

This was surprisingly easy, and Skype lets you keep a small version of the person you’re video calling on top of all other screens, so I put her on the top left of my screen and presto! Long-distance movie night.`