www.makemkv.com

Hi!
I am new here and I salute you all! First of all, please excuse my english!

A few weeks ago, I google for a 3D Blu-ray disc software ripper and that's the way I found out about the "MakeMKV" software!
I downloaded the latest version (1.8.7) and I use it for ripping a few 3D Blu-ray discs!
I followed the steps seen in many tutorials over the internet, and I extracted the Mpeg4 MVC 3D Extension too (I checked that box too) along with the Mpeg4 base file.
The loseless extracted (ripped) file suppose that should be a 3D file, right?
I verified the extracted "3D" file with Media Info and it says "Format profile : Stereo High@L4.1 / High@L4.1" and "MultiView_Count : 2", so...it should be a correct 3D MKV file, right?!
Unfortunatelly for me, all I can see is just a 2D image and never I can get a 3D image, even if the file is a ...3D video ripped by MakeMKV!
I use only a Sony Vaio laptop with Nvidia video card (1GB) and a passive LG 3D TV (42LM620S)! I use no other hardware for displaying 3D videos!
I have to mention that I already converted many 3D Blu-ray discs with DVDFab, in 3D MKV videos with SBS or TAB formats, and the result is 100% correct 3D video files, played with KMPlayer or PowerDVD!
When I use MakeMKV for ripping a 3D Blu-ray "by the book", I always get only a 2D vedo image, but no 3D files at all!

My questions are:
1. Is it possible to get a real 3D video files (MKV with loseless quality, of course), using MakeMKV for ripping a 3D Blu-ray discs, and the resulted ripped MKV 3D files to be displayed like a real 3D file (not only 2D like always does) to a passive 3D TV directly from my laptop, or... the MakeMKV is designed for using the resulted 3D ripped files with another hardware equipement only, for getting a real 3D image?!
2. If it is possible, what are the exact steps for doing so?

I want to use MakeMKV for ripping, because it is loseless quality and it takes just a few minutes only, and ...of course: I want to rip....not to convert, like I do it with DVDFab!
I hope to understand me and to provide me good answers!

Thank you so much for your help!

For your info Cyberlink Powerdvd12 and Cyberlink Powerdvd13 does not support the 3d extracted using MakeMkv.
The official reason is that this type of 3D is not a correct standard.

2 years ago makemkv started to advertise this feature but actually the only HW players that support this 3D are the Mede8er Player. Why?

At the moment i don't have the answer yet.

ltm82

ltm82 wrote:For your info Cyberlink Powerdvd12 and Cyberlink Powerdvd13 does not support the 3d extracted using MakeMkv.
ltm82

I didn't mention about PowerDVD for extracting! I was mention about....DVDFab for extracting!
What I specify about PowerDVD was as a 3D player only!
Read carefully!

when i wrote "For your info Cyberlink Powerdvd12 and Cyberlink Powerdvd13 does not support the 3d extracted using MakeMkv."

It means that powerdvd can't read the 3D extracted "using" makemkv as tool to convert 3D bluray in 3D mkv.

bye

ltm82 wrote:when i wrote "For your info Cyberlink Powerdvd12 and Cyberlink Powerdvd13 does not support the 3d extracted using MakeMkv."
It means that powerdvd can't read the 3D extracted "using" makemkv as tool to convert 3D bluray in 3D mkv.

It is reading the extracted file by MakeMKV BUT only as 2D file only! Bye!

yes in 2D works correctly. but it's 2D. If you try to click in powerdvd on the 3D button you only get a fake 3D because powerdvd is not able to detect this type of 3D. For the cyberlink developpers this 3D is not standard.

I have spent many month with cyberlink support to get that powerdvd12/13 can read it but without success.

1. At the moment the ONLY program on earth that can play a "proper" 3D rip like the kind ripped by MakeMKV is "StereoScopic Player" and you will need to buy a license for that.

2. Every other kind of 3D ripper produces either an SBS or OU type of 3D file, which is not "proper" 3D because you are not getting full HD resolution for each eye, you are actually getting half resolution for each eye.

The reason pretty much every player out there can play SBS and OU 3D movies without any problems is because:

a. They are stored exactly the same as 2D movies. The frame sizes are the same, only ONE video stream is required, they take up the same amount of disc space as the 2D version, and there is nothing special about the files, the files themselves are normal MKV files that LOOK exactly the same as the 2D MKV. The ONLY difference is that 2 frames (1 for left eye and 1 for right eye) have been squashed into every 1 normal sized frame stored on disc.

b. Your TV converts that back into separate frames and expands those frames to normal size when you play the file and figures out how to show you those frames as 3D. It actually has NOTHING to do with your player in that case.


3. The kind of 3D rip that MakeMKV does is a COMPLETELY different story to SBS or OU. MakeMKV does NOT squash frames and compress things. It rips the left and right eye frames RAW and stores the frames for each eye as TWO SEPARATE video streams inside the MKV files.

That means that your player (playback software) needs to understand how to read an MKV file that has TWO video streams inside it, and also needs to understand how to send that data to your TV in the SAME way that a proper Blu-Ray player would.

A MakeMKV 3D rip should be MUCH BIGGER than the equivalent 2D rip of the same movie, because there are many more frames stored on disc.

MakeMKV does not alter the source or compress anything. It simply rips the 3D movie into an MKV container exactly as it's stored on the Blu-Ray disc with every full HD frame for both eyes kept intact.

But you need special software to play that, and currently ONLY Stereoscopic Player can do that.

http://www.3dtv.at/products/Player/Index_en.aspx

Thank you for your answers!

SiliconKid wrote:1. At the moment the ONLY program on earth that can play a "proper" 3D rip like the kind ripped by MakeMKV is "StereoScopic Player" and you will need to buy a license for that.

2. Every other kind of 3D ripper produces either an SBS or OU type of 3D file, which is not "proper" 3D because you are not getting full HD resolution for each eye, you are actually getting half resolution for each eye.

The reason pretty much every player out there can play SBS and OU 3D movies without any problems is because:

a. They are stored exactly the same as 2D movies. The frame sizes are the same, only ONE video stream is required, they take up the same amount of disc space as the 2D version, and there is nothing special about the files, the files themselves are normal MKV files that LOOK exactly the same as the 2D MKV. The ONLY difference is that 2 frames (1 for left eye and 1 for right eye) have been squashed into every 1 normal sized frame stored on disc.

b. Your TV converts that back into separate frames and expands those frames to normal size when you play the file and figures out how to show you those frames as 3D. It actually has NOTHING to do with your player in that case.


3. The kind of 3D rip that MakeMKV does is a COMPLETELY different story to SBS or OU. MakeMKV does NOT squash frames and compress things. It rips the left and right eye frames RAW and stores the frames for each eye as TWO SEPARATE video streams inside the MKV files.

That means that your player (playback software) needs to understand how to read an MKV file that has TWO video streams inside it, and also needs to understand how to send that data to your TV in the SAME way that a proper Blu-Ray player would.

A MakeMKV 3D rip should be MUCH BIGGER than the equivalent 2D rip of the same movie, because there are many more frames stored on disc.

MakeMKV does not alter the source or compress anything. It simply rips the 3D movie into an MKV container exactly as it's stored on the Blu-Ray disc with every full HD frame for both eyes kept intact.

But you need special software to play that, and currently ONLY Stereoscopic Player can do that.

http://www.3dtv.at/products/Player/Index_en.aspx

SiliconKid, I learned more in reading this single post than I have in most all my other 3D research combined! Thank you!

I know this is an old thread, but I'm wondering if there are any updates on this technologically. Is this "Stereoscopic Player" still the only option for playing "true" 3D movies?

I am still sorting out a comprehensive solution for 3D playback. I prefer to have uncompressed, full-quality 3D, but I use Plex as my HTPC package and I don't think it can handle 3D outside the SBS type stuff which isn't software dependent.

I'll stop there now. I don't want to hijack this old thread, but it contains some awesome info! I want to know more!

Thanks!

Hi

If you use Plex you have no chance whatsoever of playing MVC MKVs (3D format taken raw from BluRay) as it stands.

There are still very few things that can play MVC MKV properly.

I've seen it work on a Raspberry Pi 2B running OpenElec Kodi.

And I believe that there are a handful of media players with built-in firmware that can handle it, but I have no hands-on experience with those.

To this day my dedicated HTPC running the latest version of Kodi (15.2) still cannot play MVC MKV. That's because FFMPEG still doesn't support it, and Kodi leverages that for media playback. Stereoscopic Player can play it on that same HTPC, but the UI isn't great and it's such a mission to play anything outside of Kodi that I end up not bothering.

Sadly there has been very little progress in that space this year.

SiliconKid wrote:Hi

If you use Plex you have no chance whatsoever of playing MVC MKVs (3D format taken raw from BluRay) as it stands.

There are still very few things that can play MVC MKV properly.

I've seen it work on a Raspberry Pi 2B running OpenElec Kodi.

And I believe that there are a handful of media players with built-in firmware that can handle it, but I have no hands-on experience with those.

To this day my dedicated HTPC running the latest version of Kodi (15.2) still cannot play MVC MKV. That's because FFMPEG still doesn't support it, and Kodi leverages that for media playback. Stereoscopic Player can play it on that same HTPC, but the UI isn't great and it's such a mission to play anything outside of Kodi that I end up not bothering.

Sadly there has been very little progress in that space this year.

Thanks! Are you saying that essentially there is no option with Plex or other polished HTPC packages to use anything other than SBS/TAB files for 3D?

Is there a comprehensive primer on 3D stuff that you know of? I am fascinated by this topic and want to learn more!

Thanks again!

Hi

I never claim to an expert on anything because there's always someone that knows more, somewhere

But I have done an enormous amount of research on this particular topic, as you are now, so I happen to be up to speed on what's going on with this particular topic, mostly.

From what I can tell, and as far as I'm aware, there is absolutely no motivated effort by any company or open source group out there to support MVC MKV.

There are a handful of open source projects like FFMPEG where the work is on a backlog and if somebody wants to handle it, but nobody is jumping forward to take that work on because it's not exactly trivial work as far as I can tell, and as a software developer myself I can understand why not.

SBS and OU (TAB) are relatively easy to implement support for because they are packaged and played as a 2D video effectively. So there really isn't a huge amount you need to do to support that in any given application. The TVs will deal with all the messy splitting of images into 2 separate images and expanding the compressed images on the appropriate axis etc. All the software has to do is provide some support for proper file naming conventions, provide some enhanced UI, and then send it on.

MVC MKV, on the other hand, requires that the player starts to interact with the display device in a special mode over HDMI, and the player (the decoder the player uses) needs to be able to handle a container with dual video streams, which is most definitely NOT standard behavior. And then there's all kind of other horrible HDMI specification level stuff related to comms over the wire to the TV bla, bla, bla. Basically it's complicated and messy.

I built a small application for XBMC/Kodi so that I can actually play MKV MVC movies in Stereoscopic Player, but launch that from inside Kodi, in the Kodi UI. Kodi provides intergration mechanisms for that and I just plugged into that and refined it. But again, it's messy and complicated.

I'm obsessed with video quality and I have a reasonable sized physical BluRay disc collection that I have ripped to MKV myself, so I would also like a simple way to play MVC MKV properly at this point, but it doesn't seem to be getting any urgent attention unfortunately.

I'll probably look into this more now that I'm on leave for a few weeks and see if there's been any progress lately. I haven't checked in detail for a few months.

Plex is a great system, but it really isn't suitable for a hardcore HTPC in my opinion (I'll get a million people shouting at me for that comment).

I only say that because in my view you need the HTPC talking directly to your A/V receiver and display device (TV, Projector) and fetching your media directly from source (NFS, SMB share straight over the network, no middle man) if you really want to guarantee maximum performance and quality.

With Plex (which I have great respect for by the way) you get awesome convenience and multi-device support thanks to transcoding. But when you start wanting to bitstream 7.1 channel DTS-HDMA or play MVC MKV, stuff like that, you are going to run into issues because of the Plex server playing middle man.

That's why Kodi is my premium HTPC solution. And I favour NFS shares for the fastest access to the media on the network, directly.

Good news, you can convert from an MKV 3D to a format suitable for playing on another player.
Software
LINUX Mint 17 (will this work with windows? I'll leave that for Window users to test)
MakeMKV 1.9.10
FFMPEG (it does not appear that avconv shipped with many Linux distros has the required filters)
I compiled my FFMPEG from source but that was only to include other codecs, not the filters.
Target player
Samsung 3D TV

The first thing that has to be done is to load your 3D movie into MakeMKV then expand the Title (this will be the largest Title on the disk) and Video section within it so you can select the 3D video. On the disk I used to test this was MPEG4-MVC-3D. Would be nice if this was selected by default if present.

Save the MKV file.

Use mkvinfo to check the file. You should find a line in the Video tack section that reads Stereo mode:
In my case it was Stereo mode:13 (both eyes laced in one block(left first))

Now we use ffmpeg to convert to a suitable format. The information for doing so was found at https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html under 9. Video - 9.130 stereo3d. Lots of input/ouput options here but the one of interest for input was ‘al’ alternating frames (left eye first, right eye second).

Question was is this mode:13 in mkv the same as ‘al’ alternating frames (left eye first, right eye second) listed in the ffmpeg filters documentation.

Only way to find out was to test it, but what output do I need. For my Samsung I could use either abl (above below left eye first) or sbsl (side by side left eye first). I chose sbsl mainly because I have seen 3D sample for another brand done like this but there are many other options to choose from.

Open up a terminal window in the folder containing the mkv file and enter

ffmpeg -i <filename>.mkv -filter_complex stereo3d=al:sbsl <filename>-3D.mp4 (where <filename> is the name of file to convert)

As the conversion progresses you will no doubt see many error messages, I just ignored them.

What you end up with, after some time,is a new .mp4 file. In my case it was 4.9Gb, somewhat smaller then the 26Gb mkv file.
Now it is time to see what we have. I use vlc for playing media. When opening the file it told me that Video Acceleration was not available. I did not read the whole message as I should have because I would have discovered a clue there why I got a fail later. Clicked Ok and up came my movie as expected with two frames side by side (the absl in the filter). Great, copy to thumb drive and plug into 3d TV, "not supported format" error.
Back to the computer and used mediainfo-gui to check format of video. No wonder it would not play, it was 3840x1080!!! This is why the video acceleration failed in vlc and I would have seen it if I had read the whole message.

Let's run ffmeg again using the command I use to create 2D mpg files from disks. Note that I am from Australia hence the pal-dvd.

ffmpeg -i <filename>.mp4 -y -target pal-dvd -pix_fmt yuv420p -g 15 -b:v 4100k -maxrate 7680k -minrate 4100k -bufsize 50Mi -packetsize 2048 -aspect 16:9 -b:a 448000 -ar 48000 -threads 0 <filename>.mpg

Better, I now have an mpg file of the correct dimensions (1920x1080) that comes in at 4Gb.

Can we make this a one step process? lets try

ffmpeg -i <filename>.mkv -filter_complex stereo3d=al:sbsl -s 1820x1080 -aspect 16:9 <filename>-3D.mp4 (probably don't need the -aspect 16:9)

This resulted in a much smaller (2.8Gb) file. It has AVC (MPEG-4) video stream but a bit rate of only about 3000 Kbps.
Tested on TV and works although the 3D is obviously not up to the blue-ray standard

Lets try something a bit more complex

ffmpeg -i <filename>.mkv -y -filter_complex stereo3d=al:sbsl -target pal-dvd -pix_fmt yuv420p -g 15 -b:v 4100k -maxrate 7680k -minrate 4100k -bufsize 50Mi -packetsize 2048 -s 1920x1080 -aspect 16:9 -b:a 448000 -ar 48000 -threads 0 <filename>-3D.mkv

You could use .mpg instead of mkv for the destination file, in fact any suitable "container" such as avi or mp4 could probably be used.

OK, the file size is back up to 4Gb with MPEG video stream with an overall variable bit rate of 4646kbps. This is probably something that will play on most 3D players and although the quality if not up to Blu-ray it is OK.

http://www.connecta2000.com/BDtoAVCHD/?lang=en
This will create a matroska file but I think it compresses it, it's free so give it a go.

From their webpage:

The software compresses the video to achieve the desired overall size of 4.7 GB or 8.5 GB with the highest possible quality.

Most definitely compresses the video...