A Minecraft-style voxel world where your friends actually show up — and the movie plays for everyone, in sync.
Grab a room code, walk into the theatre, claim a red seat, punch your buddy in the head, kill the lights, and watch. No accounts, no installs — it's a website.
▶ Play now → screen-smp.onrender.com
Live demo — hosted on Render. Open it, create a room, send the code to a friend.
You and Alex, outside the theatre. Room code's in the corner — send it to a friend.
- 🎬 A real movie night — a giant voxel screen inside a proper dark theatre, red stadium seats, curtains, and a light lever that actually kills the lights for everyone.
- ⛓️ One timeline for everybody — play, pause, seek: the host drives, everyone else is glued to the same frame. Late joiners get warped to the current timestamp.
- 🌐 Play almost anything — paste a YouTube link, Vimeo, a raw MP4, HLS/DASH, or just a
video page and the server resolves it with
yt-dlp. Built-in catalog of open-license Blender films included, zero setup. (DRM streams are refused with a friendly shrug.) - 🧍 Your Minecraft skin — type your username, your real skin loads from Mojang's API. Or upload any 64×64 PNG. Steve is the fallback for the nameless.
- 💬 It's a multiplayer server too — chat,
/sit,/wave, punch to sync an emote to everyone, Tab for the player list, public rooms you can just browse into.
Lights on, film rolling.
Lights off. Now it's a cinema.
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| WASD + mouse | Move / look (double-tap W to run) |
| Shift / Space | Crouch / jump |
| E (aim at a chair) | Sit down — E again to stand |
| E (anywhere else) | Movie settings — paste links, play/pause, seek |
| E (at the light lever) or L | Theatre lights on/off |
| Right click | Punch (everyone sees it) |
| F5 | First-person ↔ third-person |
| F | Full-screen video mode (the movie takes over the window) |
| T / / · Tab · Escape | Chat · player list · release mouse |
| /sit / /wave / /help | Chat commands |
npm install
npm run dev # server :4000 + client :5173Open http://localhost:5173 in two windows, create a room in one, join with the code in the other. That's genuinely all it takes.
yt-dlpon PATH is only needed for pasted links (YouTube/Vimeo/pages). The built-in catalog works without it.
npm run build # client → client/dist, server → server/dist
npm start # NODE_ENV=production, serves everything on one origin (:4000)Or ship it with Docker:
docker build -t screen-smp .
docker run -p 4000:4000 screen-smpOne process, one port — the server serves the built client, so there's no CORS to
configure. Point a host at it (there's a render.yaml for Render, and the image runs
anywhere that takes a Dockerfile) and share the URL. The official one lives at
screen-smp.onrender.com — every push to main redeploys it.
Defaults work for local dev. .env.example has the full list.
| Var | Default | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
PORT |
4000 |
Game server port |
CLIENT_ORIGIN |
http://localhost:5173 |
Allowed browser origins (comma-separated in prod; leave unset to reflect everything) |
VITE_SOCKET_URL |
/ (same origin) |
Socket URL baked into the client build (only needed if client & server are on different origins) |
YOUTUBE_COOKIES_B64 |
unset | Optional — base64 of a Netscape cookies.txt from a logged-in YouTube session. Only needed if YouTube bot-checks your server's IP ("Sign in to confirm you're not a bot"); the image already ships a PO-token provider for the usual case. base64 -w0 cookies.txt to encode. |
| Layer | Stack |
|---|---|
| Client | Vite · React 18 · TypeScript · Three.js · socket.io-client |
| Server | Node · Express · Socket.IO · TypeScript |
| Video | yt-dlp resolver → /api/stream same-origin proxy (range requests, segment cache, HLS/DASH), hls.js/dashless in the player, single-<video> pipeline |
| State | Authoritative in-memory rooms on the server — positions at 10 Hz, interpolated remotes, timestamped playback with drift correction |
| Tests | node:test — 30/30 passing (npm test) |
The server owns the room: membership, host role, positions (clamped to the world), chat, and the canonical playback state with a timestamp. Clients send movement at 10 Hz and interpolate everyone else. Playback carries a server time; each client estimates where the video should be and only corrects when it drifts past 1.5 s — so no annoying per-frame seeking. Host disconnects, the host role passes to whoever joined first. Empty rooms get garbage-collected.
- Voice chat — mic levels tint your name tag green (speaking indicator), but actual WebRTC voice is a next step, not an MVP step.
- Accounts / database — rooms are in-memory and ephemeral. Guest life only.
- Mobile controls — touch-look exists in the engine; a virtual joystick doesn't.
Sample films are Blender Foundation open movies (CC-BY). All voxel/character art is generated procedurally at runtime — no Minecraft assets, textures, or branding are bundled, and skins come from your own Mojang account data.