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  1. Hi all - another newbie (Yikes!). Looking to get a jump on shooting some test 3D video for the just released Nintendo 3DS. There isn't much information out there yet, but since their stills are using the MPO 3D format used by Fuji FinePix and they are supposed to have Netflix 3D video playback this summer I am guessing that their 3D video format might be similar to the Fuji 3D-AVI file and may be onboard now. Any takers on this? Mods - sorry if I am in the wrong place for this - I do see a thread on the Fuji 3D camera and demuxing on this VideoHelp.com post here!
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  2. I'm a MEGA Super Moderator Baldrick's Avatar
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    Moving you. This is not news.
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  3. Hi Baldrick thanks for getting this in the right place (still finding my way)! The 3DS was released Sunday 3/27 in the USA so I thought that made this potential news format-wise but can see your point.

    I should have my 3DS in two days and would like to start testing files to see if I can get an 800 x 240 3D-AVI to playback with the unit as is! Some of the things I will need to know or try are side by side? vertical interlaced? Interlace Frequency? Ideal Framerate on moderate video activity? Can it do 30FPS or will it be more like 15FPS? Is the right eye left frame or second interlace (parallax barrier tech)? Should be very interesting to work this out for those interested around the world. Hope someone with a better take on multiple stream AVIs, Nintendo's version of 3D-AVI and the Sharp 3.4-inch display might be able to jump in with some thoughts! This could be a lot of fun being the first to come up with some answers for 3DS owners!
    Last edited by Blrock; 29th Mar 2011 at 10:54. Reason: Wanted to provide readers with more 3DS 3D video test details
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  4. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    Had to do a little research (portable gaming is NOT one of my areas of expertise), but it looks like for photos, it does truly support MPO, which opens it up to sharing on PC, converting with StereoPhotoMaker to all kinds of other formats and uploading to flickr, etc. Very cool.
    Plus, a photo created elsewhere SHOULD be ok when converted in SPM from SbS, etc into MPO and saved on an SD card for use in the 3DS. I say should because there might be some proprietary header data in 3DS-originated pix that where the lack of it keeps the 3DS from showing it, but luckily that's a long shot.

    3Dvideo downloads are supposed to be supported with a new system update, but NOWHERE is it ever mentioned what the actual video format will be. Here are my assumptions:

    1. Since the only way to get video into the 3DS is either by Internet dl, xfer from another 3DS, SDcard load, or cartridge, there is no real "backwards compatibility" format requirement.

    2. Since the display is really only showing 400x240x2views, there isn't a major bandwidth bottleneck either. Even at 30fps 4:2:2 uncompressed that's only 88Mbps. Using an efficient compression like h.264 would likely bring that down to ~1Mbps. Well within WiFi, SDcard, and cartridge xfer rates.

    3. There have been negotiations between Nintendo and Fuji last fall (along w/ Netflix) regarding downloading of videos, so there is some credence to the adoption of dual-stream-muxed AVIs.

    4. The chipset in the 3DS seems to be powerful enough, so it's likely that smooth, full 30+ fps playback is possible.

    5. Dual-video stream muxed AVI is within the official AVI specs, it's just a rare and unusual implementation of it, which most vendors ignore or forget to support, and so it isn't easily accommodated. Sometimes it even crashes an application (bad programming, I say). So there are only a FEW tools that can currently deal with it correctly, making conversion/sharing further problematic. (More on that some other time... )

    6. MPO, otoh, is specifically a 3D-enabling spec. IOW, if you support MPO, you're supporting the 3d implementation of it. NO incompatibility. Plus, MPO is a consortium-wide agreed world standard, whereas dualAVI was created by Microsoft. In big business, this can make a difference.

    So, while I'd like to see dualAVI supported on the 3DS, I'm not going to hold my breath. They can just as easily support Double-bandwidth SbS, etc.

    IIWY, I'd convert a few titles to a few variations @ 30fps (we're talking Japan=NTSC here):
    A. SbS Full (800x240)
    B. SbS 1/2 (400x240)
    C. Over/Under Full (400x480) - skip O/U 1/2 (400x240) as it doesn't make sense qualitywise.
    D. Interlaced Full (400x480) - also skip interlaced 1/2 for similar reasons

    Also try:
    E. Frame-sequential (400x480) @ 60fps
    F. Dual-mux AVI (convert using Graphedit)

    Try 'em out.
    Good luck, and let us know what you find out,

    Scott
    Last edited by Cornucopia; 29th Mar 2011 at 19:27. Reason: typos, and some extra
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  5. WOW Scott! What an amazing detailed answer - thanks so much for taking the time on this! Will try your suggestions - but since you indicate video playback capability needs a Nintendo firmware update it is sounding like testing cannot start until Nintendo (more likely Netflix) is ready this summer. I guess a test video can be broken down into stills and if there is a fast frame buffer - play the stills back on the 3DS by holding down the advance button.

    By the way - from what I have seen - unlike the games where the slider will increase or decrease the amount of 3D by changing convergence positions on the eye pairs - when viewing the still pictures from the camera the slider becomes a switch with 3D either off or on. With off you see one of the pairs full frame. With the slider on - the picture size drops by about 80% in size with about a 30 pxl black frame with soft edges around the 3D display. The 3D looks very good with full dimension if the shot is staged right. In fact - my eyes were falling out with the 3D game Pilotwings Resort but with the photos - things looked great with no strain. If anyone on the board who is familiar with the 3DS knows a pre-patch video work-around reading files on the SD card, that would be good to hear about!

    As far as what the device can do - I will start with 24FPS video at double bandwidth SbS 800 x 240 since that is what the native screen resolution is. I am guessing that would require the least amount of processor overhead. As far as the smaller picture size going to 3D in the photo mode- I don't understand why they need that to happen.
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  6. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    AFA system update, I saw a page on their site where (IIRC) you can get the update now and view a test 3D music vid by OK GO.

    AFA 24fps, even though this is less BWidth, I think it's more likely that they'll distribute in 30fps as I'd bet it more closely matches the native FR of the LCD screen (remember, this is their only intended display channel).

    In photo mode, are you sure that slider doesn't include IAT (inter-axial translation) adjustment? With the slider at its max, you would see black on the edges to adjust the stereoscopic window accordingly.

    One thingI should mention: while the 3DS is probably a lot of fun, with ONLY 400x240 per view, the 3D quality is going to be pretty low.
    Stereo3D quality is determined by resolution on the Z-axis which in turn is determined by the binocular parallax differences, which is itself constrained by the Horizontal resolution. IOW, a 320x240x2view image has ~1/2 the Z-axis resolving of a 640x240x2view image, which is ~1/2 again of a 1280x240x2view image, which is 1/2 of 2560x240x2view. At one extreme, the Z-depth is discreet planes (aka cardboard cutouts), while at the other, it's naturally rounded. Unfortunately, the 3DS is on the low end, so don't get your hopes up too much. (This is another reason why HDTVs are really the 1st consumer medium that can fully demonstrate 3D)

    ..........

    When you try out video, try various COMMON consumer codecs and containers, too. (like MPG, AVI, MOV, MKV, MP4 and like h.263, MPEG1,2,4/DivX/Xvid,h.264, MJPEG, DV) Start with 2d and then use the ones that work to try the 3d.

    Scott
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  7. Hi Scott, Great post! Interesting point you make on the limits of the device - on the other hand - this will probably be the only consumer device on the market for at least a year with a reasonable level of 3D display capability and a distribution of millions of units. This is a good device to learn what works and what doesn't.

    On resolving problems - I have seen what you are talking about in terms of 2 dimensional 3D. If you don't stage your shots very carefully so that there are always objects running from the foreground to your angle of view's disappearing point you are limited to front middle and background cutout planes. On the other hand - you are not looking at an immersive big screen experience - these limitations are on a novelty sized 3.4 inch screen so viewer expectations will be different. As long as you shoot for the medium's limitations you should be fine.

    As far as FPS - don't forget Netflix will be streaming 24FPS films this summer. True for NTSC it is 29.97 with 2-3 pull down but since this is a digital system there is no need for that and the extra bandwidth on what could be tens of thousands of streams per day. I have never seen a frequency problem on other handhelds at 24FPS - although that was always viewing 2D. As an added bonus the 3DS operates at the vertical resolution of one field so we don't have to deal with video interlace problems porting videos to the device.

    Speaking of Netflix, it will be interesting to see how they manage their major studio film streams. It seems like smaller mobile-sized files could become very attractive captures for some users.

    Thanks for the update info - I will look. Hope that is a general access page and not on a password protected developer section. Get back to you with results - probably over the weekend!

    Brian
    Last edited by Blrock; 30th Mar 2011 at 08:12. Reason: Added Netflix
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  8. I downloaded some sample Fuji 3D AVI files from this page:

    http://finepix.com/3d/en/download/index.html

    The files have two separate MJPEG video streams. I don't imagine the 3DS would use that -- it's not high enough compression. In any case, it's hard to find tools that do anything sensible with two video streams in an AVI. Most tools only show one of the video streams. VLC opens two windows and shows one in each window. AviDemux in COPY mode made one video stream by interleaving frames. I was able to take the output from that to create a color anaglyph with AviSynth:

    AviSource("new.avi")
    ConvertToRGB()

    left=SelectEven()
    right=SelectOdd()

    red=ShowRed(left)
    green=ShowGreen(right)
    blue=ShowBlue(right)

    MergeRGB(red,green,blue)
    Click image for larger version

Name:	3d.jpg
Views:	486
Size:	180.6 KB
ID:	6225

    Once you have the two (left/right) videos in AviSynth it's easy to manipulate them. For example to create a side-by-side video you would use:

    AviSource("new.avi")

    left=SelectEven()
    right=SelectOdd()

    StackHorizontal(left,right)
    GraphStudio can demux the two video streams. Here I've remuxed the two video streams into two separate AVI files (audio only in the left AVI):

    Click image for larger version

Name:	graph.png
Views:	1007
Size:	13.0 KB
ID:	6226

    Once you have separate left and right AVI files it's easy to deal with them in AviSynth. For example, the color anaglyph script above becomes:

    left=AviSource("left.avi").ConvertToRGB()
    right=AviSource("right.avi").ConvertToRGB()

    red=ShowRed(left)
    green=ShowGreen(right)
    blue=ShowBlue(right)

    MergeRGB(red,green,blue)
    Or to create an interlaced video where one field has the left view, one field has the right view:

    left=AviSource("left.avi")
    right=AviSource("right.avi")

    left=SeparateFields(left).SelectEven()
    right=SeparateFields(right).SelectOdd()

    Interleave(left,right)
    Weave()
    Last edited by jagabo; 30th Mar 2011 at 09:24.
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