3D movies in VR

jack3d

I'd like to bring up a topic like 3D movies in VR. I've always watched 3D movies on my Samsung 3D TV, but after I bought an Oculus and tried to watch there, everything changed, now I'm a fan of 3D movies in VR. Write who watches 3D movies and what do you think?

philpw99

I got over 700gb of 3D movies, 200gb of 180/360 videos, and I put them in a 1TB sd card, which I always brought along when traveled.
When need to play them, I'll put the SD card in an OTG adapter, then plug it in my phone.
In my phone I will turn on wifi tethering and run a DLNA server app.
Then I will use my Quest 2 to connect to the wifi, and use DeoVR to find the DLNA server. Sometimes DeoVR cannot find the server, but I can still use the browser manually to show the share files in a html page. I will click on the file link that I'm interested.
After that, I can just sit back and enjoy the movie or video for a long time. This method works everywhere, including at 10,000 feet altitude or in the middle of the ocean.
Watching 3D movies in VR is like a true blessing. Even bad movies suddenly become interesting because of various 3D effects.

Gava

philpw99 can you share some of your favourites?

philpw99

Gava
Those movies are everywhere. Just search sbs or hsbs, you will find many.

boboweb

The greatest problem of all 3D SBS movies is the low resolution which is 4K (upscale) in the best scenario but 99% is just 1080p ... I dont see any development in last 10 years so i think this format is pretty much dead and honestly do not expect it to revive anymore... So 3D SBS is no Go for me which is pity indeed ... My last hope is Apple to revive 3D movies with Vision Pro and Apple TV maybe ...

philpw99

boboweb
The 3D movies from BluRays are actually in 2x 1080p format. So you can convert them into full TB resolution like 1920x2160.

They are displayed with a FOV about 60 degrees, not 180 degrees. The result is near 30 ppd(pixels per degree), so the quality is good enough to watch.
Also, if you have some spare time and GPU power, you can scale up the movie 4x to 3840x4320. You will notice the quality is slightly improved. I once did it with Avatar 3D using AI scaling, and the end result is pretty nice.

Jacques3D
IMHO the regular 3D movies are phrasing out. 3D 180 videos are the king. It offers much better immersive experience and less editing/stitching. I hope one day big companies will notice this trend, and start making movies in this format.

Jacques3D

Hello, I am a 3Ds enthusiast and practice 3D with a Sony TD10 camcorder. The fact that the videos are in 1080p is due to Blu-ray broadcast on a 3D television. The format is MVC.
The broadcast on television of a television program was in Side by Side 50%. The disappearance of 3Ds means that MVC no longer exists except on software like PowerDirector, Magix, and Vegas. People with Sony, JVC and Panasonic camcorders can choose only these software to edit their videos. With the appearance of VR headsets, the definition is low for reading on these headsets. This is why I upload to two platforms: Deo VR for my VR180 3Ds and You Tube for my 3Ds. In my Quest headset, (with the You Tube VR APP) the presentation of 3Ds made with cyberlink PowerDirector, are presented in Side by Side while the videos made with Magix play in relief. This is due to yt3d metadata which is no longer applied by PowerDirector.
Sincerely

boboweb

philpw99 The 3D movies from BluRays are actually in 2x 1080p format. So you can convert them into full TB resolution like 1920x2160.They are displayed with a FOV about 60 degrees, not 180 degrees. The result is near 30 ppd(pixels per degree), so the quality is good enough to watch.

This is not correct and the VR Headset FOV on which you watching such movies usually is much larger ...The 3D SBS format is 1920x1080 or 2x960x1080 . So per eye PPD even at FOV 60 is 960/60 = 16 PPD . But it wont be good at all to watch such movie at VR headset at 60 FOV but at least at 80-90 and then the PPD drops to 11-12 ...

philpw99

boboweb

If you rip a Bluray 3D movie, you will actually get two 1920x1080 video streams. So with the help of ffmpeg or other software, you can combine those two streams into a 1920x2160 video (top and bottom), or a 3840x1080 (side by side) video. I converted quite a few of those 3D movies and watched them in Quest 2. The experience is great.

The optimal movie watching FOV is 60 degrees. It's not too wide and not too small. I do agree that if you watch them in 90 degree FOV, it's much closer and the 3D effect is better. For me it's just too close and not comfortable after a while.

boboweb

philpw99 You was right about 3840x1080 (side by side) - thanks for the info !
So which VR player will you recommend me to play such movie on Quest 2 ? Is DeoVR good for this ? Seems DeoVR play these vids fine but there is no sound ... guess it doesnt support D5.1 decoding ...

philpw99

boboweb
Right now I use Skybox to play those movies. It supports both SMB and DLNA sharing, and it supports custom aspect ratio, unlike DeoVR. The $10 price is absolutely worth it. I wish DeoVR could do the same: offer a $10 pro version and give us the features we need.

You can convert any 3D movie's soundtrack into AAC stereo with a simple ffmpeg command:
"C:\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg.exe" -i %1 -c:v copy -c:a aac -ac 2 -b:a 224k "%~dpn1-out.mkv"
Paste the text above in a *.cmd file, and change the ffmpeg.exe path for your system.
Then you can drag a movie file into that cmd file to generate a new video file at the same folder.
The conversion is fast, because it won't change the video.

boboweb

philpw99

You mean PC version of Skybox - right ?

philpw99

boboweb
Of course not. Skybox in PC requires a VR controller, and I only have a xbox gamepad. So I only use Skybox in Quest 2.

In PC, the best VR players are Play'A and DeoVR.

Play'A supports OpenXR directly, so you can run it without SteamVR.
DeoVR has the easiest GUI to use, and the simple web browser is also useful.

Other VR players:

Whirligig is a good effort of one man's VR player. It's powerful, but the interface make it hard to use.
HereSphere is a quite impressive implement under Unreal engine. It's too expensive and the interface still need lots of refinement.