3D Vision Blog » Other S3D Tech

Blu-ray 3D Movie Playback With PC on a 3D HDTV Using HDMI 1.4

Bloody — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:21:01 +0000

Following up on the story about the Roxio Cineplayer BD With 3D not being available anymore and the fact that there remain only three software Blu-ray 3D-capable players I’ve decided to check the current situation with them as well. I often get questions if somebody would be able to watch 3D movies on his old PC or laptop on a new 3D HDTV, something that seems easy at first, but things may get problematic depending on what is the video card in the system. The problem is that not all software Blu-ray 3D players support every popular 3D output mode and not output modes are available for all output formats.

Below you can find the requirements for playback of 3D videos on HDMI 1.4 3D HDTVs with the different solutions for playing back Blu-ray 3D movies, these are as per the website of the software developers requirements and specifications published on their websites… and they are not that clear.

Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5
- NVIDIA GeForce 200/100 Series (Mobile/Desktop) or newer
- AMD (ATI) HD 5000 series or newer
- Intel G45(?) or newer

Corel WinDVD 11 Pro
- NVIDIA GeForce 500/400/300/200/100/9 series/8 series or newer
- AMD Radeon HD 6000 series or newer
- Intel H5x series or newer

Cyberlink PowerDVD 12 Pro/Ultra
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 or newer
- AMD Radeon HD 6800 series or newer
- 2nd generation Intel Core processors with Integrated Graphics

So if you have a system with these specifications as a minimum (the specific GPU depending on the manufacturer), in theory you should not have trouble playing Blu-ray 3D movies on a 3D-capable HDTV using HDMI 1.4 frame packaging. These software solutions of course also support Nvidia 3D Vision, 3D DLP Checkerboard and Row Interleaved (passive 3D), Anaglyph and maybe a few extra ones and with them things are generally easier to setup and they simply work. The real problem is making things work using HDMI 1.4 frame packaging and it might turn to be more problematic, in my experience, to make an integrated Intel GPU work, so as a good advice I’d recommend to download the trial version of the three software Blu-ray 3D players mentioned above and try them all on your PC before deciding which one you should buy. This can save you a lot of trouble in actually making thing work as you want them to and not having to rely only on some requirements listed by the software developer as practice tends to show that these not always turn out to be true or things simply don’t work as you expect them to. Also, another good advice is to always use the latest official video drivers and to have all the updates for the player software as these do help in resolving some issues, although in some rare occasions they also might break compatibility.

Active 3D vs Passive 3D In Terms of Video Game Performance

Bloody — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:14:06 +0000

It seems that there is a strange misconception going on around that since passive 3D monitors use only half of the vertical resolution for displaying the frame for each eye you are supposed to get higher fps in a game. But this is far from the truth, because even though each frame for each eye displayed with a resolution of 1920×540 on a passive 3D display is actually still rendered in 1920×1080 resolution and then the extra lines are being discarded. As a result you have the same performance requirements for rendering the stereoscopic 3D image on either passive 3D or active 3D monitor, even though you are getting a bit lower resolution on the passive 3D solutions when viewing the result.

Rendering at Full HD resolution on passive 3D solution allows you for example to save stereoscopic 3D screenshots or 3D video from a game with full resolution, though this might not work on all stereoscopic 3D solutions. It also allows you to get better quality of the image without having to resort to very performance taxing solutions for anti-aliasing as lowering the vertical resolution can lead to more jagged edges. Using the extra visual information that has already been rendered can help process the stereoscopic 3D image that is going to be displayed, so that it will look better, even though the extra vertical lines from each frame are still being discarded. That does not help much when you have very small details or small text displayed using passive 3D setup, but still can help improve the overall visual quality without much of a performance loss. In the end you can expect to get pretty much the same number of FPS on the same system running either a passive 3D display or an active 3D solution for gaming in stereoscopic 3D mode. Actually with passive you can be getting a bit less fps due to the extra processing of the images before they are being displayed on the screen, but the difference is very small, so you will hardly notice it.

TriDef 3D 5.2 New Feature: Shift One Eye, Dominant Eye

Bloody — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:39:58 +0000

The latest TriDef 3D 5.2 (Ignition 3.5.6) software has introduced another interesting new feature that I kind of missed at first and you might’ve as well – the “Shift One Eye” feature. It is something that you might want to play with a bit to see if it will work well for you and that may depend a lot from one person to another.

Traditionally, 3D is produced by shifting the camera viewpoint to the left of centre for one eye, and to the right for the other. With Shift One Eye turned on, the camera will remain in the central position for one of the views, and be shifted to the left or right for the other. This is great for first-person shooters, for example, as it allows you to use the game’s inbuilt aiming system.

The Dominant Eye setting can be used to specify which of your eyes is dominant (this eye will see the unshifted view). According to various sources (listed on Wikipedia) around two thirds of the population is right eye dominant, so we’ve used that as the default setting.

When using Power 3D mode, shifting one eye also improves performance. It’s for this reason that Shift One Eye is turned on automatically if Power 3D Quality is set to “Medium” or “Low”.

In order to be able to test the new feature you need to run a game from within TriDef 3D Ignition, then call up the OSD menu (default key for that is Numpad 0), navigate to the Output menu and turn on the “Shift One Eye” feature, and you can also change which is your dominant eye – Left or Right.

- To download the latest TriDef 3D 5.2 software with the Shift One Eye feature…

Testing Radeon HD 7970 Crossfire Scaling Performance in Stereo 3D

Bloody — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 09:42:06 +0000

With the release of the Catalyst 12.2 WHQL drivers AMD has made available the official support for Crossfire in stereo 3D mode (previously only available in beta drivers) and as I’ve promised I did some testing to see how the Radeon HD 7970 will scale its performance in stereo 3D mode with a single and dual cards in Crossfire. I’ve used the 23-inch LG D2342P passive 3D monitor along with the TriDef 3D software as a middle-ware providing the stereo 3D support in games. Then a few more demanding in terms of performance games were ran with a single Radeon HD 7970 and with a dual HD 7970s in Crossfire in stereoscopic 3D mode and you can find the average framerate that was achieved below.

Test setup:

- Motherboard: Gigabyte X79-UD3
- Processor: Intel Core i7 3960X @ 4.6 GHz
- Memory: 8 GB Exceleram DDR3-1600
- Storage: 120 GB Intel X25-M SSD
- OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
- Video card: Radeon HD7970s with Catalyst 12.2 driver
- 3D Monitor: 23″ LG D2342P-PN (Passive 3D)
- 3D Middleware: DDD TriDef 3D 5.1 software

Games were tested on 1920×1080 resolution with maximum detail settings and 4xAA enabled where available (AAA for Metro 2033 with DOF disabled), unless AA gets forced to disabled from the software in order to get better performance. Have in mind that the framerate in the table and graph is per eye, the graphics card actually needs to render twice that number of frames, so each eye gets a slightly different perspective in order to create the 3D image.

As you can see from the results when the Crossfire is working as it should in stereo 3D mode there is quite nice scaling in terms of performance when you add in a second video card. But considering the fact that the games used for testing are all popular titles and have been available for a while already there were some surprises. For example there was no scaling in terms of performance at all in Skyrim, Mafia II did not run in Crossfire by default, but when forced it worked just fine and scaled well, and F1 2011 was just crashing with Crossfire enabled. Also take a look at the average framerate achieved with a single card in stereo 3D mode, a bit on the edge for comfortable gaming… meaning that you should compromise a bit on detail levels or extra filtering settings and that is the current flagship GPU from AMD. But still the addition of Crossfire support in stereo 3D mode is a good thing finally happening after a long wait, so now you can actually add a second card and get a performance boost over the not so good framerate you may be getting in stereo 3D mode, and up until a few months you could not do that. Now, another interesting question is how does the Radeon HD 7970 compare to the newly released GeForce GTX 680 in stereo 3D mode and I’m sure that there are a lot of people wondering about that already…

Free Online Stereo 3D MPO to JPS Photo Converter Tool

Bloody — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:07:30 +0000

There are already quite a few free and commercial applications that would allow you to convert 3D photos from the MPO format to something more common and usable such as a 2D view of the photo (left frame) or a JPEG stereo pair in a Side by Side configuration. Sometimes however you may not have any of these handy and you might need to get a 2D frame or a JPS version of a 3D photo taken in MPO format and something else might help you do the job. There is a free online tool that allows you to convert a MPO 3D photo into a separate Left and Right frames as well as to make a JPS Side by Side stereo pair of the 3D photo. The website works quite well, although it may have some trouble with larger MPO files and sometimes the JPS photo turns out to be completely blank, instead of what it should contain. Other than that it does a pretty good job most of the time.

- To try out the free online stereoscopic 3D MPO to JPS photo converter tool…

Free Stereoscopic 3D Photos From Around the World in MPO Format

Bloody — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:45:47 +0000

On his website Christian Roux provides access to a lot of photographs taken by him from different places around the work and while most of them are in 2D, there are some interesting 3D photos in MPO format also available. The photos are in provided in lower than the original resolution they were shot in and the author is also selling the full resolution versions if you are interested. Some of his 3D photos are also available in anaglyph 3D and there are also some 3D videos available as well, all of them were shot using the Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D W3.

- Visit Christian Roux’s website to see the stereo 3D photos he has shared…

The 3DSteroid Now Supports 3D Displays on Android Smartphones

Bloody — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 17:38:39 +0000

3DSteroid is an Android application written by Masuji Suto that allows you the easy taking, adjusting and saving stereoscopic 3D photos with a non-3D capable Android-based smartphone. The application uses the single camera available on pretty much any Android smartphone to guide you to take two photos and combine them into a 3D one and then view the 3D photos you’ve taken using multiple viewing methods. And now the latest version of the program also brings support for using the autostereoscopic 3D displays of 3D-capable smartphones such as the LG Optimus 3D, HTC EVO 3D and such, but still the software is not yet able to take advantage of the 3D cameras that some of these devices also have. The 3DSteroid application has two different versions, the normal one which is free and fully functional and the 3DSteroid Pro version that has some extra features. The Pro version allows the taking of higher resolution photos and also supports automatic adjustment for the two photos that are being combined into a stereoscopic 3D photo. Both versions are available on the Android market or as Google recently started calling it Google Play, just follow the links below for more information as Masuji Suto’s personal website hasn’t still been updated with the latest info about them.

- For more information about the free 3DSteroid Android application…
- For more information about the 3DSteroid Pro Android application…

The Importance of Your Eye Health for Stereoscopic 3D Perception

Bloody — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 20:58:49 +0000

I’ve talked about the fact that often getting bad experience when watching 3D content can be due to multiple different reasons, one of the most common being the bad quality of the 3D content, but it actually is only one of the possible reasons. Actually one of the other very common reasons that often gets overlooked is the possibility of the viewer having a problem with his/hers vision. It is not that you might need to wear glasses, even if you are wearing prescription glasses or contact lenses they may not be good for watching 3D, as it also depends on what type of an issue with your vision they are intended to correct. In reality every person sees the world differently and that goes for 3D movies as well and when you don’t have a base to compare you usually blame the content for the bad experience and don’t try to look for the problem in other places… it is simply the easiest thing to do.

The problem can really be inside yourself, and while in 3D movies we don’t have the option to tweak the depth and convergence experience, like in stereo 3D games, you can play with other things that can change the experience at least a bit. But no matter what 3D content you are watching and on what display (also important factor for a good 3D experience) if you have trouble with your vision you might be disappointed from the 3D in overall, thinking that all the 3D content you’ve tried is actually bad, flat or whatever while at the same time the problem might be in you. If you go to a 3D movie or watch one at home that everybody is saying is great and looks simply astonishing in stereo 3D, but you are disappointed from the experience you are getting, that is a good hint that you should go and check your eyes, as most of the time the problem can be resolved if you have some sort of an issue with your vision. Of course it is not necessary that your vision might be the reason for you not getting good 3D experience, and eliminating all the possible setbacks is the only way that you can ensure that you are getting the best 3D experience you can. There is an interesting publication covering more in-depth the subject about problems with vision and stereo 3D over at Barry Sandrew’s blog that you can take a look at if you are interested in how issues with vision could affect your perception of 3D…

- To read why “People Who Hate 3D Movies Should Have Their Eyes Examined”…

Using Tegra 3 Devices for Stereo 3D Output on External 3D Displays

Bloody — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 22:00:42 +0000

Lately Nvidia has been talking a lot about their new Tegra 3 platform and during MWC 2012 together with their partners they were demonstrating a lot of new products based on it that should soon be coming on the market. Meanwhile the only Tegra 3-based tablet that is already on the market – Asus Transformer Prime is getting a lot of attention, but one of the features of the latest Tegra platform, also supported on the Transformer Prime, is kind of overlooked. While there is still no Tegra-based tablet or smartphone with a built-in stereoscopic 3D display, you are able to actually use these devices with a 3D-capable monitor or a 3D HDTV in 3D mode. The Tegra 3 platform officially supports stereoscopic 3D output over the HDMI 1.4 interface, so if you connect it to an external 3D-capable display you can actually use a device such as the Transformer Prime to play 3D videos, watch 3D photos and of course play games in stereoscopic 3D format…

Actually the most interesting part is that the Tegra 3 uses a very similar technology like 3D Vision on PC to enable the stereoscopic 3D rendering of some games. Thanks to the increased performance of the Tegra 3 you are able to automatically, and in real-time, convert some OpenGL based games and apps into stereo 3D and play them on a big 3D-capable display. And the nice thing is that you also have an easy access to controlling the level of depth on a Tegra 3-based device similar to the way that the depth slider works on the 3D Vision.

Here is what you need to do to activate the 3D mode on a Tegra 3-based device:

- Connect your Tegra 3 mobile device to a 3D-capable monitor to 3D HDTV with HDMI 1.4 support.
- Look for Tegra Zone games that support the “3D Stereoscopic” feature, you can easily spot them on the Tegra Zone app or at Tegra Zone web site, use the “3D Stereoscopic” category filter.
- Start the game, the game will automatically be rendered in stereoscopic 3D mode on the 3D-capable external display as the screen of the Asus Transformer Prime or another new compatible tablet or smartphone based on Tegra 3.
- To adjust the 3D depth in game, pull up the quick settings menu (from the lower right corner of screen) and adjust the 3D depth slider left/right to decrease or increase the level of depth you are getting.

Currently there are 16 game titles optimized for Tegra that are supporting the real-time stereoscopic 3D conversion if you connect your compatible Tegra 3 device to a 3D-capable display and thanks to the ability to also use a console game controller together with your tablet you can get something that is quite close to a 3D-capable console. And thanks to the hardware accelerated video decoding and playback features one Tegra 3-based tablet could easily become a portable stereo 3D video player that would allow you to play 3D HD video clips on your big screen 3D HDTV for example. The last thing would of course need some work to make things work the way you want them to, but since there are still not a lot of options available for portable HD video players supporting stereo 3D video playback it is definitely something to dig a bit into. So maybe I should consider getting a Tegra 3-based Transformer Prime tablet to play a bit with and test and experiment with its 3D-capabilities. If you already own one of these devices and have tried the stereo 3D capabilities together with an external stereo 3D display feel free to share your feedback below…

- For a list of all the Tegra-optimized games that support stereoscopic 3D rendering…

Why There Are Still No Portable 3D-capable Laptops Available

Bloody — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:27:31 +0000

If you are on the look for a mobile computer that has a 3D-caapble display you may find with a surprise that there are quite a few options available, but all of them are bigger in terms of size and are mostly targeted for multimedia and/or gaming use. There are however no small and compact laptops that offer a great mobility featuring a 3D-capable display and while there are multiple reasons for that, the more interesting question is why nobody is trying to offer such a product on the market. it is understandable that laptop manufacturers want to target the gamers with 3D-capable mobile products that have a lot of powerful hardware, but still most gamers would prefer to go for a really powerful desktop solution as quite a lot of these very powerful gaming laptops do not offer much a mobility. Of course providing a 3D-capable laptop with a screen size of about 10 to 13-inches could seem as even more niche segment than gaming in stereo 3D on a laptop, but there are people like me that prefer to use a portable mobile solution at work or on the go and it would be nice to also have 3D display on it. And then when you get home and want to play games in stereo 3D on a powerful desktop PC or enjoy a Blu-ray 3D movie with the whole family sitting in front of a big 3D HDTV.

Alienware for example has already demonstrated that you can get a prety decent GPU like the GeForce GT 540M in a compact laptop with their Alienware M11x, so why not have a similar solution that also features a 3D-capable display? Of course I’m not talking about getting a portable gaming laptop that could do stereo 3D games as that would require more GPU power, but even the 540M is quite capable for running not so demanding games in stereo 3D mode. Come on, where are those ultrabooks with a 3D display, nobody wants such a device instead of a 3D-capable tablet or a smartphone? I actually use a 12-inch non-3D capable laptop and need to carry a pair of standard paper anaglyph red-cyan 3D glasses in order to be able to do some quick previews in 3D of different things, so I’d love being able to do that on a similar size laptop with a proper 3D-capable display. Of course being a stereo 3D enthusiast means that I work with a lot of different stereoscopic 3D content every day and while the LG Optimus 3D is a nice help at times thanks to its autostereoscopic 3D display it is also not without limitations such as the lower resolution…

But what are the actual problems that you could face if you decide to make a portable laptop with a 3D-capable display? With portable laptops that have a smaller screen size of lets say up to 13-inches you cannot get an LCD panel with a very high resolution, you should go for either 1280×800 or 1366×768 and that is actually one of the major issues. If you go for autostereoscopic 3D display you will not need to wear glasses, but you will have a quite low resolution in stereo 3D mode and the price of the laptop could be quite high. Going for passive 3D solution would be more price attractive, but will require you to wear a pair of polarized glasses and besides the lower resolution you will be getting in 3D mode, you will have to often put on and remove the glasses when doing different things and switching between 2D and 3D mode on the laptop. I mean getting half horizontal or vertical resolution on the small size screen of a such laptop in stereo 3D mode won’t be very convenient, but still it will be useable for not so demanding users. Going for another option, an active 3D display capable of working at 120Hz (this could turn out to be a 2D gamers’ wet dream especially in a M11x like laptop), but that would be more expensive and you will again need 3D glasses, active ones for use in stereo 3D mode. With the active approach you will not be loosing any resolution in 3D mode, but you would still have to wear 3D glasses, you could however keep wearing the glasses even when switching between 2D and 3D mode, the only inconvenience here would be that you would have to carry the glasses always with you and keep them charged and ready to be used whenever you need them. But hey, is there anyone actually making a small 10 to 13-inch LCD panels for laptops that are 120Hz capable, I don’t think so, but there are already companies making 10-inch 1080p displays with 3D capabilities for tablets.

So are portable 3D-capable laptops just so niche that nobody want to get there, or laptop makers are afraid that they would be too hard and expensive to become interesting for potential customers, or… what do you think? Is it just a matter of inconvenience to make such products at the moment or the technology needed for achieving good portable size stereo 3D experience still needs some work. Would you go for a portable 3D-capable laptop if you had the products available on the market, of course nor for gaming in stereo 3D, but for lets say use for 3D video and movie watching or 3D photos – generally for multimedia use? Of course offering a good mobile experience – high performance, long battery life, good connectivity and maybe even not so bad graphical performance as well and with stereo 3D support just being a useful extra that you could take advantage of. Feel free to leave your comments below…

3D Vision Blog » Other S3D Tech

Blu-ray 3D Movie Playback With PC on a 3D HDTV Using HDMI 1.4

Related posts you might be interested in:

Active 3D vs Passive 3D In Terms of Video Game Performance

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TriDef 3D 5.2 New Feature: Shift One Eye, Dominant Eye

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Testing Radeon HD 7970 Crossfire Scaling Performance in Stereo 3D

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Free Online Stereo 3D MPO to JPS Photo Converter Tool

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Free Stereoscopic 3D Photos From Around the World in MPO Format

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The 3DSteroid Now Supports 3D Displays on Android Smartphones

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The Importance of Your Eye Health for Stereoscopic 3D Perception

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Using Tegra 3 Devices for Stereo 3D Output on External 3D Displays

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Why There Are Still No Portable 3D-capable Laptops Available

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