maxurl, video control

Hi Yoann,

sorry for this long post, I didn't had the time to make it short ;)

It's not a trivial task... (But I hope someone proves me wrong ;) ). You are right, pubnub requires internet access. If you want to go for the html5/ solution you need a way to "inform" the client browsers that they shall load/start a video. that's problem number one.

problem number 2:
You should be aware that even though most mobile browsers support the tag, that doesn't mean that they can all play the same video formats/encodings. The usual web solution for that is to provide several files in several formats (ie. mp4/h264, webM etc..). Well, you simply have to test that on several devices and browsers to make sure that it will work.
In any case it will never be precisely in sync. you will have different delay times on each client.

for the first problem:

As I said, I don't see a "2-liner" solutuin, so let me give you some background information first...

http is by it's nature a "stateless" protocol. In other words the client (browser) has to send a request to the server and only after that request the "connection" between client and server is opened. The server now can send data to the client. Once the data are transmitted, the connection is closed and the server cannot send anything to the client.
It is called stateless, because the server has no information about the state of the client.

(nowadays also web-sockets exist, which are a bidirectional connection, but i'll come to that later..)

So by it's pure design http wouldn't allow to build something like a chat, where messages are "pushed" from the server to the client. There are two solutions/workarounds:

- pulling
- a so-called comet implementation (this is what pubnub is using).

the comet implementation works with a trick: the client sends a request to the server, the server does NOT respond, therefor the connection stays open (for a while, if it times out a new request is send). If there are data to push to the client arriving at the server, it uses the open connection to send the data. Once they have arrived the connection is closed and the client immediately opens a new connection by sending another request. A comet implementation can be rather tricky to work reliably on different browsers - unlike you find some good javascript libraries, I don't think it'll be feasible to write that code on your own...

pulling is much easier: clients just send a request o the server in fixed intervals (i.e. every 10 seconds) to get the new data. Well you will have a longer delay for the messages to arrive, therefore, the implementation of a pulling is really easy in javascript (on the browser).
It is really a 1-liner: http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_timing.asp
BUT it causes very high load on the server. so if you try this option, you need to make performance tests with the server.

So finally the last option: web sockets.

web sockets work much like regular network connection, just via internet protocols, hence a browser can use them. (I have no information about the support of web sockets on different mobile browsers, that would be something to research... )

With a web socket a bidirectional connection between the client and the server is opened, and it stays open until it is closed. when the server sends data to the client a callback function triggered to do something with that data. the client part for a web socket seems to be quite straight forward. This is a jQuery plugin - though I haven't used it yet:
http://jwebsocket.org/documentation/reference-guide/jQuery-Integration

On the server side it is more tricky, you will have to create a small web-app (i.e. php program) to set up the socket. Some static pages providing the player and the videos won't do the trick.

To make a long story short:

I think the easies solution would be to give the WiFi network you are using an internet connection and go with pubnub (even though it is a technical overkill in the backend most of the work is already done by te push service).
As a second option you can try the pulling approach.

Hope that helps at least a bit and dosen't confuse even more ... ;)

Lastly there might be some streaming solutions, but I don't have much knowledge about that...

Best Jan