Watching movies with my S.O. under quarantine

Does anyone have a good solution for syncing up movie streams remotely? I want to watch a movie together with my girlfriend while we’re both quarantined (and not together, and not on the same continent–I was evacuated with the Peace Corps this last week, which makes things…rough).

I can share my desktop through Viber (the Whatsapp of Eastern Europe), but when I start a Criterion movie, the movie part turns black. This doesn’t happen on Youtube, but I have a Criterion subscription and like to use that…or maybe I’ll get a Netflix subscription.

I’ve started poking around and found twoseven, but I haven’t tried it and am wary.

What is everyone else doing?

A long time ago, when I watched movies remotely we would both queue them up, start them to get past the buffering for a few seconds, and then pause them. We would then do like a 5-4-3-2-1 GO and hit play. It’s not perfect, but it was close enough to feel like you were watching a movie together.

That solution only works if both have a subscription to the content provider (ie Criterion). I suspect that might not be the case, so in that circumstance it’ll be tougher to find video content that a) is not DRM’ed and b) runs smoothly & in sync when viewing via a remote desktop software.

So, I also think the better option is for both to have a good source & use the countdown approach. BTW I read there’s netflix chrome addon called Netflix party? Thats supposedly geared towards communal viewing.

Yeah, Netflix party:
https://www.netflixparty.com/

In another thread, somebody posted kosmi.io, which might work.

Yeah this is how my wife and I watched movies/ shows together in the year I was working away from them. As you say, not perfect. But worked well enough for our purposes.

Probably not a solution for Criterion, but I have some friends that use Watch2Gether. It only explicitly lists “YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and SoundCloud” as sources. Still might be valuable for somebody

I have had great success with Discord screensharing and:
Netflix
Hulu
Shudder
Youtube
Downloaded AVIs or whatever via Potplayer.
Games.

All of the sites in Chrome or Opera (had to use Opera for a while because sound was broken with Chrome but it’s fine at the moment).

What does not work: Edge at all, the Win10 Netflix app (and possibly other desktop app versions of sites), Cyberlink PowerDVD. Just doesn’t show anything.

Note that it’s imperfect - we have experienced a range of issues but none were more than temporarily annoying.