I've bought myself a new 3D TV and I'm loving it!
However I'm bumping into issues I never thought existed.. Until now..
Most 3D movies out there are either top/bottom or side by side. They are encoded into one file, and that's where my problems start.
A few times I wanted to crop the movie so that it would be 16:9 instead of having to see any letterboxes, but immediately I started having troubles.
Let's say this is our video file:
The problem with cropping, is that all media players think that is a flat file (which it is..) and crops without any regard to the 3D aspect of it, so I get something like this:
And with that - the top portion of the screen gets cut, and the bottom, along with the sides. It wouldn't be a problem if this was a 2D video, but cropping the top means that the bottom portion of the video is still left with that bit, but the top doesn't have it - it messes up the video when viewing with 3D glasses.
And because one eye still has the video, but the other doesn't - it's just impossible to enjoy or even watch the movie.
Another thing that came up, was one movie was encoded poorly, and didn't include the appropriate black border padding it should've had. I tried changing the aspect ratio, but then again.. Problems.. The issue is, although the aspect ratio get's changed overall:
The middle bits also need to receive padding like so:
Is there any media player out there that supports these video files in a way that I could be able to crop, change the aspect ratio etc and have it do it the right way? I've tried with VLC, but due to the fact that it has zero 3D support I now tend to use PotPlayer. It would appear it could handle these issues, because it lets you set how the 3D file is encoded (top/bottom or side by side), and draws borders to separate them - but cropping or change the aspect ratio again is limited to the entire video, not the separate video portions it's supposed to change.
BTW I'm on Win7 x64