The Volvo C30 Electric car by the Swedish manufacturer is certainly an interesting product that should start appearing on the roads in Europe in very limited numbers in 2012. It is a city car that has an operating range of about 150 km with a single charge (battery powered) and top speed of about 130 kilometers per hour. And after watching the promotional video above you could actually like the car a lot though you will not be happy by the fact that the production will be very limited initially, and Volvo will only be leasing the cars for three years, not actually selling them to the customers and the total price of the car is expected to be quite high…
But after watching the crash tests that Volvo did of the car and published them as a video in stereoscopic 3D format, even including a slow motion of the crash (using 1000 fps high-speed cameras in beam-splitter and parallel 3D rigs) you might want to reconsider. The pole crash test is with the car running at 48 km/h and the frontal offset crash test is with 64 km/h, so not that high speeds, especially considering the fact that the cars top speed isn’t that high. Still it is interesting to watch a crash test in stereo 3D format, just don’t try to imagine being in the car instead of the crass dummy. You can watch the embedded 3D video on YouTube or download it from the link below, it is in Side by Side format with half horizontal resolution.
The MKV container for audio/video has been supporting stereoscopic 3D video for quite some time, but it never got so popular and widely supported by 3D video players, the user interest in that however has been increasing since the announcement of the Popcorn Hour C-200 Video Player Getting HDMI 1.4 3D Video Support (currently available for $299.99 USD) as well as support for the MK3D (Matroska 3D Files) format. This practically opens the doors for all the multimedia players based on the platform from Syabas Technology and others as well for adding 3D video file support and playback without the need of a computer for example. But unfortunately two and a half months later nothing much has changed and there is still not a lot of content available in the so called Matroska 3D file format. What exactly is this MK3D format all about…
The MK3D format is essentially a MKV file container that has a special field set defining what type of stereoscopic 3D video material is contained in the file, so the MK3D file extension is just to make things more apparent. You can without problems also have a normal MKV file contained with the field set in its header, so that a player can automatically detect and switch to the right format for displaying the 3D content. The stereo 3D support for Matroska video files can be realized with either two separate video tracks – one for each eye, or with a single video track containing both the data for the left and right eye in multiple possible formats. If you are going to use multiple tracks than the TrackOperation field in the header is being used, but more likely you would want to do a single video track as it easier with the 3D content inside it and for that you need to set the StereoMode field.
StereoMode field values:
0: mono
1: side by side (left eye is first)
2: top-bottom (right eye is first)
3: top-bottom (left eye is first)
4: checkboard (right is first)
5: checkboard (left is first)
6: row interleaved (right is first)
7: row interleaved (left is first)
8: column interleaved (right is first)
9: column interleaved (left is first)
10: anaglyph (cyan/red)
11: side by side (right eye is first)
12: anaglyph (green/magenta)
13: both eyes laced in one Block (left eye is first) (field sequential mode)
14: both eyes laced in one Block (right eye is first) (field sequential mode)
You can set the respective value for the StereoMode field in an MKV file with 3D video that you’ve already downloaded or to apply it to a video you are encoding, so that it would become ready for devices and players that support MK3D to automatically use the right 3D format for the file. For adding the value for the StereoMode field you can use MKVToolnix (available for Linux, Windows and Mac) and more specifically the MKVmerge GUI and the Header editor that the GUI has to make things really quick and simple even for non-advanced users. And just for testing purposes I have for you a short stereo 3D video converted to MK3D (MKV file container with the StereoMode field set to the right format), so that you can just download and test with it.
Adding subtitles to a stereoscopic 3D video isn’t an easy task, especially if you want to do it in a proper and unobtrusive way, so that the people watching the video are not bothered by the subtitles they see on the screen and don’t have trouble reading them while staying focused on the picture of the video they are watching. Here is a good example of a 3D video called “Sizzle” made by Inition, Niche Films and Pacific with 3D subtitles added on top of it that were positioned and burnt in by Screen Subtitling Systems using the Poliscript 3DITOR subtitle preparation software.
The video is available on YouTube 3D, as well as a downloadable file, you can find the links for that below should you want to watch it on your 3D Vision-enabled PC. The downloadable file is in Side by Side format, 1080p half horizontal resolution (squashed), so do not forget to choose 16:9 aspect ratio when opening it in the 3D Vision Video Player or the Stereoscopic Player. And as usual you are welcome to share your comments about the video and in this specific case about the 3D subtitles as well.
) as well as support for the MK3D (Matroska 3D Files) format. This practically opens the doors for all the multimedia players based on the platform from Syabas Technology and others as well for adding 3D video file support and playback without the need of a computer for example. But unfortunately two and a half months later nothing much has changed and there is still not a lot of content available in the so called Matroska 3D file format. What exactly is this MK3D format all about…
