Full Res 3D in Plex

General Discussions
1

I posted this in another thread, but it may be useful to other people trying to do the same thing.

Having had a lot of the frustrations with little information on 3D in Plex and MKV’s this is what I ended up doing. I used BD3D2MK3D for the converting and is actually quite great. For full resolution 3D to work, you need a UHD/4K tv, UHD/4K playback device, and playback as Forced Original. I’m using an LG OLED and Roku premiere. The basic steps are as follows:

1 - Rip 3D BD with MakeMKV making sure the MVC-3D checkbox is checked
2 - Open latest version of BD3D2MK3D (link above) and Open 3D Mkv
3 - Tab 1: Verify AVC stream and select appropriate box (haven’t had to change this ever as it has determined it properly)
4 - Tab 2: Select the streams you want to include
5 - Tab 3: Add title (required) and other metadata you want (not required)
6 - Tab 5: For FULL SBS this is what I use:
• Stereoscopy set to side by side (DO NOT check “Half” box)
• If you need to hardcode subtitles then select your subtitle stream (I always hardcode forced subtitles - best way I’ve dealt with subtitles in 3D)
• I add 4 seconds of black at the beginning (gives me a few seconds to turn on 3D on TV after I click play)
• X264 encoder options (YMMV but this is what I’ve used and view as acceptable): Mode: CRF @ 24. Colour depth @ 8 bits. Nothing else checked. I’ve had issues with the 64bit version button checked so I just stick with the default.
• Project temp folder: I have the project going to a separate drive than my Plex media drive, and the output MKV folder is where I store my 3D MKV’s for Plex (once it’s done converting it will be ready to go).
• Keep checked mux MKV when encoding is finished.
• Click “Do it!” and it then prepares an encoding project - extracts all necessary streams and sets up a few scripts to launch.
• If you want it to start encoding after the project is built there is a checkbox you’ll see during project building to start encoding, OR you can launch the encode 3D (or 2D as it also can create a 2D version) script at your leisure or setup a batch encoding (under file menu) which is what I usually do.

Before I found and used that application 3D was very frustrating, but if your hardware supports it then this will give you exactly what you want. Full res 3D with all the niceties of Plex. Sometimes I have to re-encode the file because the Roku can’t playback the file forced original properly, but that has only been a few cases. Another gotcha, is if you aren’t going through a receiver that supports the audio codec, you’ll have to also convert audio to AAC Stereo or something more compatible with TVs (another option in BD3D2MK3D). If you’re going through a UHD / 4K receiver then it won’t be an issue. This may look a bit overwhelming, but it is actually quite simple and straightforward when you have the application open. Now I enjoy Full 3D with original audio.

It would be ideal to just stream the frame packed original MKV but last time I tried that my TV didn’t recognize it as a 3D stream.

Plex 3D Support
2

I have been using this software to make a few 3D mkvs but I kept it in half-SBS mode due to the warning that came up. Encoding was taking about 6-8 hours with half. But with full it’s on track to take 30+ hours. Is this normal? it did force the level to 5.1.

3

Did a test. The result was recognized by my LG TV immediately as 3D.

BUT.

1.) From a 18 GB 264 track plus a 6 GB MVC track giving in total 24 GB, the software did create a 13 GB full 3D track. That’s a lot of loss. And yes, the untouched source did contain one AVC/MVC, one audio and one subtitle track - nothing else.

2.) The output was completely stretched and the black bars above and below the video huge.

I did use the settings mentioned above. In my case, this didn’t work out of the box.

4

I got the same results with the image being stretched out. Using half-SBS it works perfectly. I will probably stick with half since it’s much faster, looks really good still, and it just works.

5

Tried half-SBS as well. This time the resulting file size went down to 4 GB (original 24 GB, full 13 GB, half 4 GB).

It did work - no bars, LG TV did recognize and play that 3D file, but this is way to much loss of quality for me.

EDIT At least one of the conversion tools uses only one thread. On a dual Xeon machine with 20 cores just one single thread (out of 40) is maxed out. Is there a way to use FFMPEG instead of these tools? AFAIK, FFMPEG tools are multithread-ready.