YouTube Adds Stereoscopic 3D Video Support (And 3D Vision Support, Too)
by Ryan Smith on May 26, 2011 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
For those of you with a 3D TV or a 3D Vision kit, this will likely be of interest to you.
Today Google will be officially activating stereoscopic 3D video support on YouTube. Google has been experimenting with stereoscopic 3D support as early as 2 years ago, but the feature never left the dark depths of alpha testing. Since then Google has worked out the kinks in the system, and along with some new features in HTML5 is formally launching it today.
3D - The Coke Zero & Mentos Rocket Car In Its Native Side-By-Side Format
In the short term this won’t do much to resolve the dearth of 3D content – seeing as how a great deal of professional content is still locked behind various CE exclusivity deals – but with any luck it should make the sharing of such content easier than sending files back and forth as it currently stands.
Meanwhile how YouTube is going about this is interesting, since it’s not so straight forward. Ultimately YouTube is supporting 3.5 different ways of displaying 3D content, due to the lack of any de-facto method of receiving 3D content. For older DLPs, passive polarized TVs, and other “simultaneous image” systems, an interleaved mode is offered that can do row/column interleave along with checkerboard patterns. For more recent TVs that can accept side-by-side frame packing (both passive and active), side-by-side is being offered. For those of you with old-school anaglyph glasses, that’s also being supported in red/cyan, green/magenta, and blue/yellow combinations. All of this is offered through Adobe Flash.
Last, but certainly not least is the .5 and likely the most relevant for our discussion: HTML5 for computers. HTML5 still uses side-by-side, but it also includes a flag to tell the browser that it’s going to be playing back stereoscopic content. With knowledge of the flag, the browser can change the device's display settings on the fly rather than passing a “dumb” image on for the display to process. on paper it’s the most user friendly option, and no doubt Google’s favorite given their stake in HTML5. And since it’s based around HTML5, it’s using WebM rather than H.264 under Adobe Flash.
Given that HTML5 still isn’t complete though, YouTube’s HTML5 implementation is also easily the more experimental configuration. At this point of the browsers that support the WebM codec it only works under Firefox 4, and strangely not Google’s own browser. In turn only one 3D display system currently works with Firefox: NVIDIA's 3D Vision. This shouldn’t come as any surprise given NVIDIA’s continued investing in 3D Vision compatibility for games and applications, but for the moment NVIDIA has a first mover advantage with YouTube’s 3D stereoscopic support. Google expects additional software and hardware packages to support the format in the future, once they implement the appropriate parts of the HTML5 draft standard.
We should note that the fact that all of this is rather experimental shouldn’t fall on deaf ears. As it stands YouTube’s HTML5 stereoscopic 3D support basically combines all the glitches of the YouTube HTML5 player with all the glitches of windowed mode 3D Vision. Since Google started enabling the feature late last night we’ve only been able to get the stereoscopic 3D player to periodically work. No doubt Google and NVIDIA will continue to work out their respective bugs, but for the time being it’s definitely a work in progress and not as easy as it’s supposed to be.
Update: After chatting with NVIDIA, it turns out SLI + YouTube is a no-go. SLI must be disabled on a system level for this to work.
Finally, as far as quality is concerned it’s a mixed bag. Regardless of any differences between H.264 and WebM, YouTube isn’t doing full resolution 3D. As we noted before, everything is either interlaced or side-by-side frame-packed, so the effective resolution per eye is either one-half vertical or one-half horizontal depending on the method used. Active shutter based systems can display each image at full resolution – hence the reason we’re going to see NVIDIA tout their support for full HD 3D – but ultimately roughly half the lines are being interpolated. However the source being half-resolution is consistent with most other 3D offerings right now due to bandwidth and decoder limitations; Blu-Ray 3D is still the only widespread media that offers full HD 3D.
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Matrices - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
I should correct myself - SLI does work in windowed mode in games and has for the past couple years, at least. It certainly doesn't work well, though (stuttering).Zoeff - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
I'm using the 275 drivers. Both the checks on this page show up as green: http://www.3dvisionlive.com/3dv-html5-detectionI've tried both firefox and chrome, just to be sure. Bad Company 2 is working just fine with 3D vision.
I give up. :-(
Zoeff - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
Ah nevermind. I reinstalled the drivers and it's working fine now. :-)Zoeff - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
Disregard that, it's no longer working.Sigh. :-/
BishopLord - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link
Looks like the new driver release, 310.33, now supports windowed 3D.http://www.anandtech.com/show/6408/nvidia-releases...
NinjaCommando - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
found this while looking around for 3d content (which there isnt much of....), be neat to see it on a tv with official support now http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wU3VpFSUY4Bolas - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
So, Anand... when can we get a 3D laptop review? There are currently a half dozen or more 3D capable laptops. I'm in the market for one. I trust anandtech.com. Sure would be nice to see some reviews.Maybe something like a comparison of the following, with gaming benchmarks for variety of games along with subjective impressions of the 3D quality for:
Asus G73SW-3DE
Alienware m17x-3D
Sager NP8170-3D
Sony VIAO 3D
HP Envy 3D
Thanks!
Bolas
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
Hi Bolas,So far, I've only had the chance to review a single 3D notebook, and it certainly wasn't the best foot forward for 3D notebooks: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3956
Here's my issue with 3D notebooks. First, gaming already puts a big hit on mobile GPUs. If you want to play 1080p games on a notebook at reasonable detail settings, you'd need the GTX 460M as a bare minimum. Second, doing stereoscopic 3D often results in performance that's less than half of non-3D performance, so as you can imagine a GTX 460M is only going to just get by at 1366x768 3D rendering. That's the third issue I have: you need to give up the 1080p LCD on many 3D notebooks (because the manufacturers know that 1080p 3D isn't possible with most mobile GPUs).
Of course the nail in the coffin for me is that I feel 3D is a gimmick -- never mind the annoyingly uncomfortable glasses; the effect just isn't that great, particularly on a laptop. If you want to use a laptop with a 3DTV, you can already do that without any of the special 3D notebooks -- just about any 400-series or 500-series NVIDIA GPU will do the trick (420M/525M or higher), and most of the 6000M stuff from AMD will handle it as well; heck, even HD 3000 from Intel can apparently do 3D (though I haven't tried it yet).
So basically, my feeling is 3D notebooks are more expensive and the only good aspect is the 120Hz display (with 3D turned off). Of course, that's no guarantee that it's a *good* 120Hz display. I've seen the Alienware M17x-3D, and that was a nice looking panel, so maybe the other 1080p 3D panels will be good as well. Still, you're typically looking at paying an extra $300 to go from non-3D to 3D notebooks. For me, it's just not worthwhile.
Matrices - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
I will add to this because I have some experience. I bought an XPS 17 3D Dell because adding 3D cost me literally nothing with the coupon codes floating around. I didn't expect much, because I'm not impressed by 3D in movies, but I was pleasantly surprised by the 3D effect. Pop-out is cool, but the real feature is depth - it simply makes scenes look more real. Very immersive, in my opinion.Anyway, having said that, I would not recommend 3D on a notebook if that is going to be your primary gaming machine. Laptops simply don't have the horsepower for it, unless you want to spend $5,000 and maybe you can find a 485m SLI laptop that weighs 20 lbs. somewhere.
The Alienware M17x, for instance, has a mobile GTX 460m, but that's not even close to good enough for smooth 3D performance at 1080p with max settings - which is what you'd expect when you pay 3K for a laptop.
I know because I went to a GTX 580 setup for my desktop to play 3D, and that is what you need for smooth 1080p 3D play with high settings in most games.
ProDigit - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
I bought my anaglyph glasses 4 weeks ago, and have seen several youtube video's already!Saying it's only out today shows how wrong you guys are!
I've been watching 3D movies for 4 weeks already!
As well as 3D pictures, and looking at 3D google maps (street view).