How to dub with friends online

One person opens a room and reads out a six-character code. Everybody else types that code into a browser, on whatever device they are already holding, and they are in. Nobody installs anything, nobody makes an account, and nobody has to be in the same country — you all dub the same clip at the same time and then watch every version back together.

That is the short answer, and most of what follows is detail people ask about afterwards: how many of you it wants, what happens when nobody brought a video, and how to run it alongside a voice call without everybody's takes bleeding into everybody else's.

What each person needs

• —A browser. Any modern one, on a laptop or a phone. There is nothing to download and no app store involved.
• —A microphone. The one in your laptop or your earbuds is fine — this is a game about commitment, not about audio quality, and nothing in it is scored on how expensive your setup is.
• —The code. Six characters, read out loud or pasted into whatever chat you are already in.
• —Guests need no account at all. You type a name when you arrive and that is the whole of your identity for the evening. Only the person hosting needs to be signed in, because a room has to belong to somebody.

Headphones are the one piece of kit that genuinely changes the result. Without them the clip plays out of your speakers and into your own microphone, so your take arrives with a ghost of the original underneath it.

How many people it wants

Two is a real game and not a consolation prize — you both dub the same scene without hearing each other, then watch both versions, and the gap between two people's idea of the same character is the entire joke. It is also the only size where you can play it in ten minutes flat.

Four to eight is where a room stops being a game and starts being an event. There are enough versions that the playback becomes its own segment, and enough people that somebody will always do something nobody expected. Ten is the ceiling.

The free tier holds two players in a room; ten needs whoever is hosting to be a supporter. Everybody else in the room is unaffected either way — the size is a property of the host, not of the people joining.

How a round actually runs

1. The host picks a clip and everybody is dealt a character out of it.
2. Everyone records their own lines at the same time, alone, hearing none of the other takes.
3. Every version plays back to the whole room in turn, and nobody has heard any of them yet.
4. You vote, for anybody except yourself.

Recording blind is the part that makes it work and the part people are most tempted to skip. If you can hear the room while you perform, you start performing to the room — you hedge, you wait for a laugh, and you end up doing a smaller version of the voice you would have done alone. Nobody hedges in a soundproof box.

When nobody has a clip

This is the failure mode of every bring-your-own-video game and it is worth planning around: six people on a call, all agreed they want to play, and twenty minutes of nobody being able to find anything. The public library exists for exactly that moment. It is full of scenes other players have already marked up — the lines timed, the characters split — so opening one starts the round immediately with nothing to prepare.

If somebody does have a clip, thirty to ninety seconds with two or three speakers is the shape that plays best. Much shorter and the round is over before it starts; much longer and the playback outstays its welcome once there are five versions of it.

Running it over Discord or a voice call

Most groups already have a call open, and the game does not replace it — it wants you talking between rounds, which is where half the evening is. There are two moments where the call has to get out of the way.

• —While you record, mute yourself in the call. Not because anybody would hear your take — they would not — but because your microphone is being used for the recording, and a call that keeps transmitting it puts your take through the call's noise suppression on the way past.
• —During playback, mute everybody except the room. Six people reacting live over the top of a dub is genuinely funny in person and unlistenable through a call, where everybody hears everybody at a different delay.
• —Between rounds, unmute everything. The arguing about who should have won is the point.

A room that shares its screen instead of everybody joining is the one setup that does not work. Half the joke is that nobody has heard the other takes, and a shared screen means everybody watches the host record.

If your take comes back late

It usually will, the first time. Every browser adds a small delay between what you hear and what it captures, and a consistent one is easy to correct once you know it is there rather than assuming you performed badly.

The whole setup is one person reading six characters out loud. If you are already on a call with the people you want to play with, you are about ninety seconds from a first round.