Lukeflix

Imagining a world without Netflix and video streaming is hard. Video content is everywhere and the world is consuming more and more of it each day. Unfortunately, video streaming doesn’t work too well without internet. After finding myself stuck in a situation where my best connection was a 2G hotspot, I decided to do something about it. Enter Lukeflix.

Lukeflix is a multi-platform video library and local streaming service. Originally designed for web browsers, it currently is also in development for iOS, tvOS and a remote for watchOS. I have no plans on actually releasing it, however, it’s a great project to test my skills in a variety of technical platforms.

How it works

Lukeflix is rather simple to use. Just select folders or external drives to load movies from. Then, ensure that the movie filenames follow a certain naming convention: “Movie Title (Year).mp4”. Lukeflix will scan through each file and find all the movies and match them with The Movie Database (TMDb) to gather cast, artwork, and other information, and display it all inside a gorgeous interface. Watching a movie or getting information is only a click or tap away. Currently the installer is in the console, however, an interface for this will be created in the near future.

The perfect match

One of the biggest challenges when constructing Lukeflix was matching movies to online content. I opted to work with The Movie Database as they provide a very high-quality and well-documented API to find movie information and artwork. I constructed a recursive file-reading script to scan through folders and identify each movie. Having two keys to search by – title, and year – helped improve the matching accuracy significantly. Of course, the API has a limit on calls, so I needed to find a way to run this task in the background. I ended up creating a task runner to handle these requests with a proper throttle and shipped them with events on my socket server to send real-time information up to the interface.

Watch with friends

What’s so great about watching a movie, when you’ve got nobody to watch it with? Gone are the days of trying to sync up the seconds after every pause or buffer. Even if you are a lone-watcher, playing to multiple devices simultaneously is also quite amazing. Lukeflix was one of my first impressions and integrations with sockets: the same technology that powers many multiplayer games. I was beyond impressed with the power that came with using them. I was now able to trigger video playback events, such as playing, pausing and more.

I may have gotten carried away, but it’s nice now to have a player I can sync multiple devices up to play the same video at the same time. Having this data, I’ve found can mean much more, especially in creating apps that can function as a remote, and even determining movie suggestions based off of what parts were watched and skipped. Without initially realizing it, I built a solid API platform, not only for a personal movie catalog but also for real-time events using sockets.

Empowering a smart home

It's one thing to have an app that plays movies or have an app that can turn on and off lights. But what if one app can do both, in context? Using the socket platform as a foundation, users can now tap on a movie to turn off the lights and set the scene for a movie and they automatically turn on again during credits, just like the theaters! It's magical. Lukeflix can control beyond lights too! Any device controllable with an API could be connected in some form. In the future I see this going a step further, just like how movies have video and audio tracks, movie producers could add light tracks, and even temperature tracks to video to control the temperature of a room to match the scene.