I don’t really understand what’s happening here. I have a collection of hSbS movies, they work excellent with other players. I set my 3DTV to side-by-side mode.
I started using the Plex app on Xbox One. After a couple seconds, the player stops playing “each side” of the movie, and just locks on to one side. It even corrects for the anamorphic “squish” that is indicative of hSbS.
What is going on? I want my hSbS movies to display correctly for side by side 3D mode. I have direct stream turned-on, my understanding is the only transcoding that should happen is for things the Xbox one doesn’t support, like DTS and subtitles. I’m not even sure how plex server even knows that there is something different with these files vs standard 2D files. It is a 1080p frame stream the same as a 2D movie it just has 2 images on each side, how does the Plex server detect this? and why?
Follow up to this, I didn’t add 3D or hSbS to the filename. They are all movie.mkv.
I don’t want plex to treat the files in any special way. As far as plex is concerned they should be played as normal with no transcoding. I want to manually put my TV in side-by-side mode. This is truly messed up, there must be some sort of 3D metadata that plex is looking for, and it’s changing the playback for some reason.
Edit: OK it seems to not happen to all the movies. So it must be metadata that is telling plex to do something to the files. Not sure how to disable this. Frustrating to have to remux all these files just to remove metadata. Is it too much to have a selectable option to leave all files as they are?
Found it, the files that are mishandled have mediainfo like this:
MultiView_Count: 2
MultiView_Layout: Side by Side (left eye first)
Files that work well have no such properties in the mediainfo.
I guess I could remux all my files to remove those properties. ugg too much work, I think I’ll just use another player for 3D movies until the Plex developers can fix this issue. Hopefully they’ll read this and add the bug to their list. Or is there a bug trac I can submit?
Unfortunately, it isn’t the Plex server that is doing this to your files, it is the Xbox One itself.
Plex itself ignores 3D formats and treats it simply as a 1080p file not a HSBS file. However, if you can provide a sample that reproduces this, the developers can then work on trying to do things on the server / app side to prevent this from happening. (Most likely it will involve a transcode/direct stream to remove the metadata triggering the view change)
The other thing I thought of, the only time I see a MultiView_Count: 2 value is when using MVC as a straight bluray rip. This format is not typically supported for 3D playback on most devices (And believe the Xbox is one that doesn’t support it) which means those devices fallback into 2D mode.
For example on a 3D Bluray using MVC I just ripped my video section looks like this:
Video
ID : 1
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : Stereo High@L4.1 / High@L4.1
MultiView_Count : 2
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames : 3 frames
Codec ID : V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Duration : 1h 33mn
Bit rate mode : Variable
Maximum bit rate : 30.0 Mbps
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 23.976 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Language : English
Default : No
Forced : No
Thanks for the response jmckee. I had noticed the issue was common to the xbox dlna player and the plex player, but I wrongly assumed it was the Plex server causing the problem.
