Currently there is a problem when a SBS movie (also other stereoscopic / 3D formats) is played on a non-3D device (zone). This is obviously ugly and unwanted.
To solve this situation I would like to see the following additional behaviour:
- The playback engine shall be aware whether a specific zone supports 3D playback or not. So we need an adjustable option per zone to tell the player whether the zone supports 3D playback or not.
- When playing 3D content on a non-3D device / zone the playback engine shall automagically scale / process the video so that the video is displayed as non-3D content; i.e. when you play a SBS on a non-3D TV the video gets automatically scaled so that you only see the left 50% of the full image scaled across the screen. That way the video is no longer ugly and can be played back on the non-3D device as the second stereo image is discarded properly.
- In order to know whether a video is 3D or not we need another special database tag that tells the renderer / player that the video is actually 3D. This flag must also inform the player about which specific 3D format that video has (if any). So values of this tag could be: "2D", "SBS", "TB" and so on.
- When transcoding is activated the processing (scaling etc) of 3D content to be played on a non-3D device must take place before the actual transcoding so that the stream is prepared correctly for the device which receives the stream.
With these little additions in place it is no longer a problem to view 3D encoded content on a non-3D device
Thanks.
(As I am unsure whether you reagard this as an "too easy" feature I will post a separate thread for this idea also.)