New features:
- Sync bar on external player pages now includes play/pause button, clickable progress bar, time counter, and a ready count indicator showing how many room members have their player synced
- "Play the video to start syncing" toast guides users through the browser autoplay gesture requirement on third-party sites (Crunchyroll, anime sites, etc.)
- "Finished — next in 5s" countdown displayed in the sync bar when a video ends
- Page metadata scraping: content script reads og:title, og:image, and site-specific selectors (e.g., Crunchyroll show/episode titles) to display in the byob.video room UI
- Vimeo URL recognition (server-side only — no extension changes needed for Vimeo embed playback)

Bug fixes:
- Fixed autoplay failures on DRM-protected sites (no longer calls play() before DRM license is acquired)
- Fixed suppression system swallowing legitimate user play/pause events after seek commands
- Fixed service worker reconnection when Chrome MV3 terminates it due to inactivity
- Fixed extension context invalidated errors when extension is reloaded while pages are open
- Suppressed bfcache port disconnect errors

No changes to:
- Permissions (still only storage + <all_urls> via content_scripts)
- Remote code policy (still no remote code, no eval, no fetched scripts)
- Data collection (still none — only playback state + page metadata sent to user's own server)

New data transmitted: Page title and og:image URL are now sent to the user's byob server instance when the extension hooks a video, so the room can display the video name and thumbnail. This data is not sent to any third party.

v1.0.1

• Chrome Web Store and Firefox AMO extension links
• Chrome Web Store submission docs
• Privacy policy link and version number in settings modal
• Centralized extension store URLs in Byob.Links

v1.0.0

Watch any video, together

byob is now at v1.0.0! Create a room at byob.video, share the link, and watch together.

Supported sources

• YouTube — synced play/pause/seek with SponsorBlock integration (auto-skip sponsors, colored seek bar segments)
• Direct video files — paste any .mp4, .webm, .ogg, .mov, or .mkv URL for synced playback with a built-in HTML5 player
• Any streaming site — Crunchyroll, anime sites, etc. via the browser extension

Features

• Video queue with drag-to-reorder and auto-advance to next video
• SponsorBlock with per-room category settings (auto-skip, show in bar, or disable)
• Room history — click to replay past videos
• Random usernames, renamable, with online/offline status
• Dark mode by default (light mode available)
• Rooms persist across server restarts

Extension highlights

• Sync bar overlay shows Playing/Paused status with timestamps
• Collapses to a small pill in the bottom-right corner
• Detects videos automatically in nested iframes and shadow DOM
• Pauses playback when all player windows close
• Authenticated WebSocket connection with signed tokens

Self-hosted

byob is free, open source (MIT), and designed to be self-hosted. Deploy with Docker or Fly.io.

fly deploy


Source code: github.com/joegoldin/byob.video