Long-Distance Movie Night
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:
- Make sure you and your SO each have a copy of the movie (sharing it via Dropbox is a big help here)
- Use Skype to video call your SO
- Open wine
- Do a countdown (3…2…1) for when each of you should click play
- 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.`