i'm not in a position to distinguish between or make a call on the three options outlined. All i can say for sure is not having proper blu ray and 3D support has gone from being a minor irritation to a major PIA as more and more of collection is now made up of blu rays rather than DVDs. The primary reason i first bought JRiver was because it was a one stop solution for playing all music and video formats and so could sit at the center of my home theatre. Lack of full blu ray support means this is no longer the case, how JRiver choose to address it is really your call, but the current half arsed approach is not a long term solution. I'm sure i'm not the only one now finding their initial rationale for buying JRiver no longer stacks up. This isn't meant to be a criticism, just honest feedback. Cheers
There are a number of issues with 3D Blu-ray support.
1. It's a complex problem - as I understand it, 3D output is handled differently by each graphics card manufacturer. Windows 8 adds a "global" way of implementing 3D support, but madshi does not want to add 3D support to madVR this way, as it limits the number of people that can use it.
I don't know whether the JRiver team have any plans on developing their own 3D solution. (my guess is that they probably don't)
2. There are a very small number of 3D Blu-rays out there - around 150 or so total, a fraction of which are actually shot natively in 3D rather than being conversions, and a small fraction of those which are even worth watching. (in my opinion, at least - I know someone that will watch
anything if it's in 3D
)
3. 3D seems to be dead in the water. Manufacturers were pushing it for a while a couple of years ago as a way to try and sell people new TVs and players, but it didn't work, and there's been little mention of it at all recently.
Now they are focused on OLED and 4K to try and sell new TVs. It's amazing how short-sighted the TV industry has been, and how little common sense the have shown in trying to make televisions commodity items that are replaced every couple of years.
4. Current 3D technology is terrible. All of it significantly dims the display. Active 3D gives you full resolution, but flickers a lot and gives people headaches. Passive 3D halves the resolution which looks terrible.
Both methods require you to wear glasses, autostereoscopic displays require you to sit in a fixed position and have even lower resolution than passive 3D. The
only good 3D I have ever seen, has been using Sony's OLED Headset. (which is a very uncomfortable device, and has serious image quality problems)
And pre-baked 3D such as that found on Blu-ray discs is an inherently bad solution in my experience. You cannot adjust the depth (displays with a depth setting "fake" it and break convergence when they do this) and there are no convergence adjustments for pre-baked content. So all 3D Blu-rays assume you have the exact same vision as the guy who mastered the disc (or whatever "average" eyes it was designed around) which doesn't work well for a lot of people - another reason many people feel ill after watching 3D.
3D gaming works very well though, because both views are rendered in real-time, and so things like depth and convergence are actually adjustable, so you can tune them for a 3D image that is suited to your vision.
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Topic: Any chance for Bluray 3D Support soon? (Read 20175 times)