Hey folks, first post in here I think. Been using plex for years but never ventured into the forums before.
This has got me stumped. I was under the impression that plex didn’t support 3D MVC MKV files? Imagine my surprise when I tried one on the off chance and it worked.
The player in question is a Rasplex connected to a Samsung TV via an Onkyo A/V receiver.
I select the file and the menu pops up asking what format I want. Both the 2D mode and SBS 3D modes work perfectly, with the TV automatically going into SBS mode for the latter.
This is an MVC MKV RIP of the Avatar 3D Blu-ray fresh from MakeMKV. How is this possible? Any ideas what is actually happening? Is Plex converting to SBS? The resolution looks full frame is there any way to tell for sure?
What Rasplex does with a file that is Direct Played, is outside of the scope of Plex Server.
It is a feature of Rasplex. And it is a nifty one they have built there.
Last time I tried it though it had some issues.
This doesn’t happen for me. When attempting to play a 3D MVC MKV file I get the same popup as you but no matter what option I select I get 2D video played.
Specifically, this is a feature with the hardware video decoder in the Raspberry Pi and all that Rasplex is doing is passing off the video data to the chip to do the decoding and display (plus configuration setup of course). Also it looks like the Kabby Lake generation of Intel processors will have MVC decoding in the graphics card as well so maybe it’ll come to that platform soon.
Note: Despite being an employee, I have no inside information about this and all of the above came from public sources.
I’m still investigating what’s happening here. I’ve also noticed that RasPlex will convert, on the fly, an h-tab mkv to h-sbs if I select h-sbs as my preferred format in preferences. I can only assume that this is what it’s also doing with the MVC files, decoding them and outputting them as h-sbs. Is this what always happens? I notice my TV only has 2 options for 3D formats, over under or side by side. Does this mean that even when playing from my 3D BluRay player it’s being converted to SBS for the TV?
With regards to the MVC files, all I’ve done now is set my preferred 3D format in the RasPlex preferences to h-sbs. Now no matter what file I play, h-sbs, h-tab or MVC, they all play perfectly on my TV without having to ask me every time.
Although I do have the odd h-sbs file that just refuses to display properly. Comes out all garbled. Nothing obviously different from the other files that do work.
I can’t answer to what Rasplex is doing as I’ve not actually tried to play 3D content with it, but I can answer what is going on with your BD player. When you play a 3D BluRay, which is MVC, the player changes the signalling over HDMI (similar to changing refresh rate or resolution) to indicate that it is sending 3D content. It then sends both the left and right eye images interleaved (full resolution) to your TV. Your TV detects this change in signalling and turns on 3D.
The SBS and TAB settings are ways for you to tell your TV that the image is actually two images either side by side or top and bottom which corresponds to the two images in 3D. This setting is necessary because there is no signalling in the HDMI to indicate that this is being done. It may be possible for a TV to detect SBS or TAB, but I’d imagine that’s generally not done.
Hopefully that explains a bit more of the background and helps you to understand what’s going on in your case.
Yeah, I’ve been messing about for the last couple of hours trying different things.
So, I have Avatar as an m2ts file. This is Frame Packed 3D (MVC).
I can play this via the Samsung Plex app and get Full Frame 3D.
I can also play this via RasPlex and have RasPlex ‘decode’ the 3D stream and output as h-sbs to my TV.
What I can’t figure out is if I can output Full Frame 3D from the RasPlex to the TV. There is a setting in RasPlex that reads “Enable Full HD HDMI for sterescopic 3D”, which sounds like it should do what I’m wanting, but unfortunately it no worky When I push play, it looks like it’s going to play, the TV switches to 3D mode (Full Frame as it comes up down the bottom right if it’s doing ou or sbs), but then I get a couple of seconds of black screen before it returns to the Info Page.
I also figured out what was wrong with my wonky h-sbs files. Seems whoever created them put h-ou into the MKV header info.
When I push play, it looks like it’s going to play, the TV switches to 3D mode (Full Frame as it comes up down the bottom right if it’s doing ou or sbs), but then I get a couple of seconds of black screen before it returns to the Info Page.