Playback of packed 3D (3D ISO)

We will add the support simultaneously (i.e. everything at once).

Sam, can you say if work is still progressing on this? I know itā€™s at the mercy of having the right dev free at the right time, but it helps to know that itā€™s actively being worked on.

This is still being actively worked on.

2 Likes

Awesome. Thanks!

OK, i have now ordered a Vero 4k+ - i hope to see testbuilds with 3D soon.

Played around with a vero 4k and latest firmware at a friends place and did find three 3D features missing:

a) HDMI 1.4a frame packet output mode (for FullHD 3D on TV/projectors and to auto-switch tv/projector to 3d even when just having H-SBS or the like). That one was clear to me from this thread - and is hopefully being work on. And is also the most important one.

b) 3D decoding of block_lr encoded FullHD 3D MKV files. As created by makemkv, interleaving the left and right images of a 3D MVC BD into a single video track in the MKV file.

I was most surprised to not see this working, because i was under the impression that this should work in platform independent kodi, but i may be wrong.

c) MVC decoding. This one i kinda get given how it requires special kodi builds with an MVC hacked ffmpeg version, but of course i would love for vero4k to support this.

Sam, out of curiosity, can you explain why SBS and TAB are an issue?

If the video is actually in SBS or TAB format, then the Vero doesnā€™t have to do anything to it at all - it can just treat it as a 2D video and the TV will switch into 3D mode using pattern recognition.

On the other hand, if the video is in MVC (3d blu-ray) format, then frame-packed output will give you the best possible picture quality.

I canā€™t think of any good reason why you might want to output SBS or TAB if the video is in MVC format: it seems unlikely that any TV which has a 3D mode at all would not be capable of handling frame-packed input, and anything other than frame-packed just degrades picture quality. If you thought that the Veroā€™s upscaling was superior to that of the television, I suppose there could be a case for converting to 4K TAB; but in my experience the TVā€™s scaling is likely to be better than the Veroā€™s.

So I donā€™t get why TAB and SBS are relevant.

Iā€™ve tried to make this point like 2 years ago.

You donā€™t need any special decoding for SBS or TAB. If I was happy with SBS/TAB output, then Iā€™d just encode all my 3D videos as SBS or TAB and any old Fire TV can play them back and any old 3D tv can display them in 3D.

Anyone whoā€™s fine with SBS/TAB has been able to use that format with any player for 10 years.

The only thing that matters is frame packed, and the only reason anyone would be keeping video files in MVC format is because they want their TV to play frame packed video.

1 Like

Yes ā€“ but only if the TV / receiver supports it.

We are getting very close now.

Sam

What TV/receiver supports SBS but not frame packed? The output from 3D blu ray players is frame packed. Iā€™m pretty sure the reason everyone wants 3D is so we can play 3D blu ray rips.

Iā€™ve never heard of a blu-ray player that even had the option to output SBS, or a 3D TV that didnā€™t support frame packed inputā€¦

Quite.

I guess the issue could people who already have their library in sbs/tab. Anyway, I canā€™t wait for this!

I guess the issue could people who already have their library in sbs/tab. Anyway, I canā€™t wait for this!

I think weā€™ve come full circle here.

If you have videos in your library encoded as SBS/TAB, then none of this applies. Thereā€™s no special hardware needed to decode them. You can play SBS/TAB videos with any player, and a 3D tv that supports the format will play them in 3D. Thereā€™s no decoding, no special requirements. Vero 4K, as well as every other media player, already works with them.

Ah yes of course - does it mean the OSD would be all messed up though?

I would think all 3D TVs have the option to either engage TAB or SBS manually, or to constantly scan the contents of the screen and switch automatically when it picks up something that looks like an SBS or TAB image. All youā€™d need to do is turn 3D mode on and off manually, and turn it off to use the OSD.

It might even work automatically - the OSD on the screen would quite likely disrupt the SBS or TAB pattern enough for the TV not to recognise it as 3D any more (if itā€™s in auto-detect mode), so it would switch back to 2D mode whenever the OSD comes up. But if that doesnā€™t work, manual mode would. I donā€™t see that as an issue.

Iā€™d like to clarify that a bit. Iā€™m the dev working on that topic since January in my spare time. I never had any documentation about how to setup the CPU/GPU to get FP working. So the only available documentation was the (partly incorrect) driver source code. Most of the time I tried to get it working by trial and error. Changing a bit here and look how the output looks, then changing another line of code there and see how that works out. That was really cumbersome and time consuming.

Back in April/May I built the first kernel which was able to switch into FP mode and display MVC content correctly. But my changes introduced a new problem: playing MVC files in 2D didnā€™t work anymore. So I had to correct that, too. My fix worked but it looked somehow wrong to me.

At the same time I also found out that playing MVC content as SBS or TAB didnā€™t work at all. Yes I know, who cares if you can play it as FP? Well, I did, because playing MVC as SBS or TAB was handled in the same code area as playing the movie as FP or 2D. I thought it should be easy peasy to fix that because I was already familiar with that piece of code. And fixing that problem would also confirm that I understand whatā€™s going on there. And if thereā€™re crappy TVs out there which canā€™t correctly handle FP content, SBS/TAB would be an alternative. So itā€™s a win-win situation.

Well, it wasnā€™t that easy :slight_smile: . While working on the MVC to SBS/TAB conversion I found some problems with my FP related fixes and finally I also found out how to correctly implement the MVC to 2D conversion. At that time Sam wrote his comment:

Because if only one of these options works, it means you have a bigger problem.

So I assume Sam meant getting MVC to SBS/TAB working and not Half-SBS/TAB which was already working before I started to look at that FP problem.

But to make a long story short: donā€™t worry, it looks like everything will work as you expect. And as Sam also said:

Last but not least Iā€™d like to thank @Chillbo and @grahamh and @sam_nazarko for their support and help on this topic.

3 Likes

Weā€™re all impatient to help you out with testing. :sunglasses:

@sam_nazarko will we get this together with the new kernel and the improved HDR->SDR conversions?

@tanio99 has been working on the existing kernel. Of course whatever tweaks are needed will be moved over onto 4.x.

Believe me, that is exactly what I expect: thorough testing :sunglasses: