Curious, whats the point of 3D
 

I know JIm has been hard at work on this 3D blue ray stuff. I'm just curious as to what benifit this will have? I can't imagine people sitting around thier monitors or tv with those glasses on to watch a screen saver. :erm:

Or is it a marketing thing, to get Samsung to include it with 3D TVs as eye candy for adversize for screen saver sales?

Just curious. :|

Exactly.

Well I hope to see this on every 3D Samsung TV at Best Buy someday soon.:TU:

I got bogged down with the seemingly endless choices of screen format / compression schemes / bitrates. Without a system to actually try this out on, it seems hopeless.

The full Blu-Ray standard is 1080p. That's 1920 x 1080 with 30 progressive frames per second.

The 'system to try it out on' is a copy of PowerDVD.

Ah, if only it were simply Blu-Ray standard. 3D is a whole different animal.

Where are you reading that there is a choice of codec, bitrate, refresh rate, or resolution? My read of the above is there is one codec, one bitrate, and one resolution. Did something change?

I'd disagree on the 1920x1080 @ 30fps, I believe the allowable resolutions and frame rates for BD-3D are:

1920×1080 @ 23.976 fps progressive
1280×720 @ 59.94 fps progressive
1280×720 @ 50 fps progressive

Plus the only supported codec is MVC. For more info the buzz-phrase to look for is "Profile 5".

John

John's right, those three possibilities represent the first of many choices you have to make. There are many other choices, such as side-by-side, top-bottom, or interleaved format.

Here's an immediate obstacle: I can't capture frames at 1920x1080 from the Aquarium, because that's not one of the choices from my video card.

So let's say I wanted to try 1280x720, side-by-side. That brings up two more choices:
1. Set the Aquarium to play in 1280x720, and capture frames directly.
2. Set the Aquarium to play in a higher resolution, and post-process the frames down to a size that BluRay can handle.

Which would look better, with less artifacting? No way of telling without a 3DTV to try it on. In fact, with all the caveats from the compression software, there's no way to predict if your 3D disk will play AT ALL on a Samsung system, without actually trying it.

I was able to get a free MVC compression encoder, but it's a command-line program with so many parameters that I got too tired of scrolling to even see them all.

I believe Cinema Craft, Sony, Sonic Solutions and NetBlender have MVC codecs, but I don't know anything about them, other than they're unlikely to be free...

It did occur that if you can scale down from a higher resolution the smoothing effect of a scaler like Lanczos might help rather than hinder.

Another option would be to letter-box it or crop in some other way.

Anyway, rather you than me... good luck!

P.S. I'd either buy another video card or see what it gives you when plugged into a TV's HDMI input. Otherwise get some hacked drivers, which may well do that mode. (Tell me exactly what your card is and I'll see what I an do.)

My video card is a GeForce 9800GT. I just realized that the inability to match resolutions is probably due to the Samsung 3D monitor. The max resolution choice within the Aquarium on this system is 1680x1050x32.

If that's the max resolution you'll find 3D at 1920x1080 tough to say the least... what model is the monitor?

It's Samsung's only 3D monitor, the Syncmaster 2233RZ.

Okay, so I see the problem. Also as it doesn't have an HDMI it presumably won't down-scale 1920x1080 content (as it might do if it had one).

I don't have an instant idea that would definitely work. Well, other than going with one of the lower resolutions. Sorry.

Yes, that's been the problem. I'm not averse to just trying a million different combinations (that's how I develped the Aquarium in the first place), but it would mean finding a sympathetic salesperson at Best Buy who would let me use the floor-model Samsung equipment. Even then, it would mean a 30-mile round-trip for each experiment.

Hi Jim,

Register to post this in case it is helpful...

Since this is an old thread you may have already overcome the resolution issue, if not and you have a computer with enough resources, have you considered computer virtualization?

A free program called "Player" can be downloaded from VMware, once installed you can set up a virtual computer, very easy to do, (an Operating System disc is required) once up and running, screen resolutions higher than your monitor can actually display are available, the "Player" interface has scroll bars.

As long as you have the correct resolution, would this allow you to output your frames for Blu-ray encoding?

I just checked and 1920×1080 resolution is available.

Hope this information is helpful and saves you having to travel the 30 miles for testing.

If you need more information please ask.

David

PS: Are there plans for the new eel to have its own tick box on the settings screen, so it can be disabled if required? Thank you for all your hard work and amazing Amiga art (been a long time fan)

Outputting the frames is no problem, it's making a 3D Blu-Ray disk that is holding me up. The disk must play on any 3D Blu-Ray player.

Hi Jim - I might be able to help you with this - I can edit and master 3D Blu-Rays - contact me at andrew "at" survivorfilms "dot" com and we can talk about it :)

Thanks, Andrew - I was hoping for something a little more close-to-home (like on my own computer) :)

But I did check out survivorfilms.com. Looks like you guys are doing some interesting ultra-low-budget indy stuff.

Why thank you :)

OK, if there's anything I can do to help please let me know. And by the way, thank you for being a huge inspiration to me ever since I first saw 'Defender of the Crown' running on my friends A1000 - you and Ron Thornton (Babylon 5) inspired me to get into 2D then 3D graphics :)