First, I have to say that OSMC seems to have really matured into a rock-solid distribution. The work it must take to maintain this level of quality for so many platforms is staggering to consider and your time is greatly appreciated.
In searching for an all-encompassing answer that might explain the lack of anaglyph support for 3D movies on the raspberry pi, I found what I was looking for in the main Kodi wiki. It states that anaglyph support is not available due to the dependence of OpenGLES rather than the more robust OpenGL. My question here is if that statement means that anaglyph support is simply impossible on the pi or if it is a feature that could possibly be seen in the future?
I’m sure a lot of people don’t even know that it is an option at all on any platform. Having tested it myself with large gatherings of friends, I can attest that it is a surprisingly effective 3D experience that can viewed from all angles, potentially giving any television the ability to view quite a library of immersive content. What’s truly amazing is that it allows for the green/magenta combination seen in the Playstation 3 that allows for natural color perception, should you happen to have those kind of glasses.
Anyway, my question is born out of curiosity as to if we might expect the feature to ever be added one day, and of course the desire to have a 3D content solution available for any television. Thanks for your time here and all the time you’ve put into OSMC to make it so amazing.
Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but my guess would be that the anaglyph processing (color division) is done in a shader on OpenGL.
The raspberry gpu doesn’t have the power to do this processing for two hd pictures simultaneously and also play, scale and overlap (combine) the video streams on the fly.
And I also think that this cannot be done with the video accelerator as it wasn’t built for this purpose. So all the heavy lifting is put on the small mobile gpu or arm processor.
They might have a more detailed answer on the Kodi forums though.
It would not be a problem to play movies already encoded in anahlyph stereo but the conversion from full color to anaglyph.
It was kept in the test builds for many months, but I never got a single report of anyone using it, so it’s been dropped. I think the number of users that are interested is so minuscule that it’s not worth the support burden.
That’s a shame. There are so many 3D movies out there and so few 3D televisions available to watch them on that I have to wonder if anyone ever knew it was there to test. I have to admit that I’m a bit biased as 3D has always fascinated me since I was a kid. So naturally I sought out as much information as possible once it was an added feature to Kodi. Even so, in all my findings, I happened to miss that anaglyph support was ever being tested on my favorite Kodi distribution of all places.
I fully understand your position however. Your time is valuable and it should be spent where you believe it will do the most good. One last question regarding this particular issue; should that it be that the main Kodi team ever approaches an OpenGLES solution for anaglyph support, would it then be a simple addition to OSMC, or would it still require too much work from the OSMC team to implement? Not being a developer, I rewrote that last question several times as I’m not sure exactly how to ask it. Anyway, thanks again for your response and your time in general.
For what it is worth, I was interested in this as well and I managed to get 3d Anaglyph working with the following methods.
Installed the OMX Player as an external app.
Created a context menu addon that exits the media player (KODI) and launches the external OMX with the selected file.
When the movie is completed (or stopped) the media player (KODI) is restarted.
You absolutely need a keyboard for this as the OMX player key mapping is different than KODI.
If you are serious about this I can create a more detailed instruction list.
I would love a more detailed instruction list & I thank you wholeheartedly. The idea of turning any TV into a 3DTV just blows my mind. With all the 3D titles out there, I can see myself putting this to great use.
If you haven’t checked it out already, make sure to look at Universal’s 3D release of “The Creature From the Black Lagoon”. It obviously restores the film’s original 3D photography, but enough cannot be said as to how effective it is. Also, albeit a conversion, the 1939 “Wizard of OZ” 3D release had an amazing team working on it that puts it head and shoulders above most every conversion that is rushed out to theaters for a quick buck. Surprisingly, I can also say the same for the amazing “Predator” 3D conversion that was done a few years back.
I’m probably rambling, but as you can tell, I’m very excited about the potential here.
Mediamogul, Great to find someone as excited about 3d as myself. I will have to look into your recommendations. I actually took my daughter to see the 1939 Wizard of Oz 3d Release in the theatre and was completely amazed at the quality of the conversion. I will try to provide you the steps that I used to get this to work. I will need to dig out the context menu Addon that I created to get this all to work as I have since re-installed my sd and have not installed the addon again.
Step 1 - You will need to SSH into your device to perform the command line OMXPlayer installation
Step 2 - I basically followed the installation instructions from here http://omxplayer.sconde.net/