Group Video Watching with Laravel

A group wants to stream videos, with the presenter selecting the movies to watch, controlling the play/pause, and seeking interesting moments. Such a presentation experience is useful for webinars, and education, among others.

We describe how to implement the experience in Laravel with the TALL stack.

Presentation Events

These events will be broadcast by the presenter:

1. Choice of video
2. Play
3. Pause
4. Going to a moment in the video

Events are broadcast using Laravel Echo Server, Laravel Websockets, or Soketi. Say on a channel streaming.

Listening to Events

In the participant Livewire component, we define the listeners:

protected $listeners = [
    'echo:steaming,VideoChoice' => 'process_video_choice',
    'echo:steaming,Play' => 'play',
    'echo:streaming,Pause' => 'pause',
    'echo:streaming,GoToMoment' => 'process_goto'
];

Processing Events

Each event is dispatched to the front-end Alpine.js code using dispatchBrowserEvent.

For example, for going to a video moment, on the instruction of the presenter,

private function process_goto($data) 
{
    $moment = $data['moment];

    $this->dispatchBrowserEvent('goto-moment', ['moment' => $moment]); 
}

Controlling the Video in the Browser

In Alpine.js, we listen to events from Livewire and then:

1. Go to the desired video moment
2. Switch the video
3. Play
4. Pause

For example, for going to a moment and for switching videos,

<video x-ref="video" 
    x-data="{ play: false }" 
    @goto-moment.window="$refs.video.currentTime = event.detail.moment"
    @video-choice.window="$refs.video.src = event.detail.video_file_path; $refs.video.load();"
>

</video>

Presenter Interface

A web page with a list of videos and a video player.

For simplicity, assume the presenter has on the web page an HTML video element.

Play and pause on the video element are sent from Alpine.js using,

Livewire.emit('play');
Livewire.emit('pause');

and when going to some moment in the video,

Livewire.emit('seek', { 'moment': $this.refs.video.currentTime });

To be processed in Livewire, in a listener,

protected $listeners = ['seek' => 'process_seek'];

public function process_seek($data)
{
    $moment = $payload['moment'];
}