The general consensus in that thread is that, while the Vision Pro can play “flat” porn videos on sites like PornHub, there is currently not an easy way to play 180 degree side-by-side videos on the Vision Pro, which is how most commercial VR porn is filmed.
Porn aside, doesn’t this mean it just can’t handle standard video formats?
It means you’ll use a third party app to watch content, just like you do for pretty much every type of content on iPhone and Android.
Just no one has published one for Apple vision yet, because no one has had one.
Kind of? But hot take - their format is actually better for flat content. They seem to want people to use their “spatial video” format which seems like it can be just two videos in a QuickTime or MP4 container. It wouldn’t surprise me if you could just use ffmpeg to convert whatever into their format pretty dang quickly. It’s actually just MV-HEVC.
Most 3D video right now is one video track with two distorted videos either side by side for flat or 180 content, or top and bottom for most 360 content. It gets encoded and played back as standard flat video and then the player does the splitting and dewarping for the headset (or for flat just correcting the aspect ratio). They don’t seem to support doing any of that in their built in player.
Instead, with MV-HEVC, they encode one eye as the “main” video track, and do deltas to get the other eye, giving you way better resolution since you aren’t splitting the frame in half, and better efficiency since you aren’t encoding essentially the same image twice (theoretically you could have a codec that could couple copy a big chunk of the frame like that but I’m not aware of any that actually do). It also means if you play it back in 2d you just get a normal video instead of a weird distorted mess, and you can swap to the other eye if you player supports multi track video. They also do some clever stuff with captions in 3d too.
It doesn’t seem like they support any sort of immersive 3d video (i.e. 180 or 360 degree fov) in their player at all, but I haven’t looked at it a ton. I mostly just took a glance at their developer stuff. It seems like a very apple thing to do since 180/360 video is difficult to do right.
The built-in video player doesn’t support side-by-side stereoscopic video formats. The title of the article should state that the AVP does not play certain 3D video formats out of the box, making the story about porn is just a weird pivot to generate clicks.
However there is already at least one third party app that plays SBS video just fine. You can also convert SBS video to MV-HEVC, which is arguably a better 3D format, and use the built-in player.
However there is already at least one third party app that plays SBS video just fine.
Which app?
You can also convert SBS video to MV-HEVC, which is arguably a better 3D format, and use the built-in player.
I investigated this and couldn’t find a tool to do this. Which tools have you seen that do this?
There is a Star Trek app that plays SBS 3D videos, so it’s only a matter of time before someone puts out a dedicated app for it.
This proprietary tool can already convert SBS to MV-HEVC. I imagine we will see support come to ffmpeg and/or x265 in the next year or so, if it’s not already being worked on. MV-HEVC is very similar to the MVC extension to AVC that was used for 3D blu-rays, so it’s not particularly exotic.
As an Index owner, it is simply not fun or convenient to jerk off wearing your VR gear. 3/10 the tech isn’t there yet.
I could not disagree more. It’s like I’m actually motor-boating three beautiful women’s massive bosoms at the same time. And it’s like they’re all really sitting on my face. I’m using a Quest though so I’m not sure if there’s a difference. Just make sure you’re using large file sizes. 10GB+.
Are you watching a video, rather than an actual game? The interactivity of a game is where the fun is, but the lack of game selection is an issue.
Can’t agree more. It was near the first time, and it was the same time that I realized it’s just not that great when it’s nothing but visual stimuli and no interaction of any sort. I’d enjoy it more if they made it more of a voyeur experience where I could move around the room and watch.
Budget issue I think, it’s really not affordable to purchase both a VR headset and a receptacle that’s more complex than a fleshlight on a sawhorse.
Oldtimers will remember…
http://www.easylife.org/fufme/index.html
Edit - for the interested, the name was a riff on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe
For the most part yeah, it’s just a novelty. The feeling of presence is pretty cool though, like the sense that someone is standing close to you. I feel like most VR porn is not taking advantage of the medium very well, might be better if it wasn’t trying to be an outright sex simulation.
The 360 video is junk. The games are where the fun could be, but the VR titles are all half baked and not well set up around 1 hand being occupied.
So, not just porn but all SBS videos are unsupported?
This is a shame. I have a 3D blu ray of Dredd that I have been unable to watch in 3D since the 3D TV fad died about a decade ago.
It’s one of my favorites. I heard rumblings of a sequel maybe 5 years ago but I doubt it’s happening.
Someone will make an app.
Apple has never had their own apps focus on supporting non-standard formats. This isn’t anything unusual.
If everyone abandons the platform because of lack of features, why would any 3rd parties bother making apps for it? So they can help out a trillion dollar company to sell their $3400 paperweight?
No one’s abandoning the platform. This is clickbait horseshit.
The features it offers blow doors off of anything else on the market, and the “competition” (which doesn’t actually exist because there’s nothing else with passthrough sufficient for AR) also needs third party apps to play content.
They’re wrong. Download The Archive. Has a built-in video player. You’re welcome.
Does it enable VR porn though? I don’t think they are saying that the vision pro can’t play videos, but that it doesn’t support the stereoscopic ones.
It does. The Archive has options for Stereo/Mono Horizontal/Vertical Plane/Sphere/Morph.
The Archive
Is that just an AVP app or an actual resource on the web some of us should be aware of?
It’s an AVP Star Trek app. I downloaded it because it has AR models of all the Star Trek ships and then found out it plays SBS 3D videos while trying to watch some of my movie rips on Plex.
Shit, even my shitty old phone in a cardboard headset can play 180 VR videos and this thing can’t
