I have a few 3D blurays that I’ve never watched in 3D. The problem is that I no longer have the 3D TV I had when I bought them, and there are no new 3D TVs, so even though I’m in the market for a new TV, it’s not worth it to buy a 3D one. I’d have to accept a much older TV that’s not as good at displaying the 99% of movies I watch that aren’t 3D. No problem, I thought, I’ll just buy a cheap VR phone-holder headset, rip the movie and watch it that way. And the VR headset is a fun enough to play with for the $30 I’ll spend on it.
Problem! Has anyone managed to do this?
I have successfully ripped the movie off the bluray (given board policies, let’s be vague on the mechanics here) and encoded it in Side-By-Side form at 720p. The movie is now super-wide. It’s two separate 720p images squashed next to each other. The problem is when I play it on my phone it shows up squished horizontally. Instead of black bars at the top and bottom, the blue people with hair cords look very thin and tall.
Maybe I’m using the wrong player? I’m just using VLC on iOS. I’m going to try reencoding it as half-again height and maybe that will work.
Has anyone accomplished such a thing? How’d you do it.
What do you mean by “squashed next to each other”? You should, I think, have a video that is 2560x720, no squashing involved. Did you encode it that way?
I think the problem is that when he plays the video on his phone, the phone stretches the aspect ratio of the video to match that of the phone’s screen. Presumably, the fix would be somewhere in his phone’s video settings, to letterbox instead of stretching.
Yes, I think so. When I play it on my computer that’s what I see.
But on my phone, it ends up in the wrong aspect ratio. VLC on iOS doesn’t have custom aspect ratios, and there’s no: 32:9 aspect ratio to choose from, so that won’t work. So maybe there’s some other video player that supports this?
Can’t help you there, I’m an Android person. Although I see my favored Android player does have an iOS version, and you can set any aspect ratio you want in that, in the Android version at least. But the Apple version seems to be selling it as a streaming app while the Android version emphasizes it being an off-line media player, so I don’t know what to tell you.
Thanks for the suggestion, but yeah, I can’t figure out how to load a video on that player.
I think the issue might be VLC getting confused by something in the video container. The output I got from some other script is an mkv, and I think it must have some metadata about the 3d-ness that’s confusing iOS VLC. I tried running it through Handbrake at 1/2 the vertical resolution, but when I played the output, it then showed up as… 1/2 the vertical resolution I wanted.
So now I’m running it through Handbrake with no resolution changes in the hopes that the reencode will strip off whatever 3d metadata is confusing VLC.