Stereoscopic 3D Video Formats

Bino plays stereoscopic 3D videos. Such videos have separate views for the left and right eye and thus allow depth perception through stereopsis.

The left and right view of a stereoscopic video can be stored using different layouts. Sometimes the two views are stored as two separate video streams, but most often both views are packed into a single video stream and need to be unpacked by the video player.

Supported input layouts (modern formats can be autodetected):

Monoscopic (2D) video
Left and right view in separate video streams and/or files
Left and right view side by side (optionally with half width)
Left and right view on top of each other (optionally with half height)
Left and right view in alternating rows

To display a stereoscopic video, the left and right view have to be prepared in a special way so that the left eye sees the left view and the right eye sees the right view. Different display techniques use different approaches to achieve this separation of the two views.

Supported output techniques:

Anaglyph glasses (red/cyan, green/magenta, amber/blue). This works with every display.
Bino uses the high-quality Dubois method to produce anaglyph images. This gives far better results than the usual full-color and half-color methods.
Left and right view side by side (used by some 3D displays)
Left and right view on top of each other (used by some 3D displays)
Left and right view in alternating rows or columns (used by some 3D displays)
OpenGL quad-buffered stereo (only available with some graphics cards)

3D Video Examples

The following sites provide example videos:

renderfarming.net
The Big Buck Bunny movie, now in 3D!
3dtv.at
Various 3D movie samples. Try the skydiving example!
youtube.com
YouTube has 3D videos marked with the yt3d tag. Some videos may be downloadable. Most of them use the left-right-half or right-left-half input stereo layout.
depthq.com
Two demo videos for a proprietary video player. They work fine with Bino, too :)
enhanced-dimensions.com
A few small example videos in the left-right-half input stereo layout.
stereomaker.net
Some example videos using various input stereo layouts.