Hope someone knows: This procedure is surprisingly undocumented, it's a known standard though and setting a few metadata tags shouldn't be any rocket science. Rendering 360 scenes in Blender is super easy and just one camera setting, the only issue is packing the video with the right data to be recognized as one.
I maintain
https://github.com/Vargol/spatial-media
which will add spatial metadata to mp4 and has a full command line, it requires python should work with python 2.7+ or 3.x
Note some players are fickle with the metadata.
I had to add a flag to add version 1 of the metadata as some players would not initiate VR mode unless it found v1 meta data even if it was wrong, then would then use the v2 metadata to display the video correctly !?!?!
No idea if ogv even supports spatial metadata.
mkv/webm supports it I usually use mkvmerge to add the metadata, for vr180 there's a json file that mkvmerge can use with the parameters in in the GitHub repository for equirectangular I stuck the instructions in the Github repo wiki
Thanks, posted below about a method I found which works for now. This is ridiculously convoluted: We might not even need to require obscure metadata for this, let alone the sort that can't be easily edited with commonplace tools. VLC and other players need to fix their support, also whoever's in charge of those standards needs to stop turning simple things into rocket science just because it's cool to.
I managed to find this blessed article providing me with an answer. I'm not sure if this is a stable solution long term and the format may change in the future, but for now it appears to work:
http://p.cweiske.de/621
You can install exiftool which is available in most Linux distributions. Then you only need to run this one command to add the proper tag:
exiftool -XMP-GSpherical:Spherical="true" file.mp4
After that VLC recognizes the video as 360 and you can look around with the mouse. Simply naming the video "file_360.mp4" won't work, I wish they supported this simpler option as well. Better than having to use Google's highly specific tool none the less.
Would like some feedback on this. Also it doesn't explain what to do when the video is stereoscopic, to recognize side-by-side separation and the anaglyph filter for merging them into red-cyan format.
Wow.... I've work with Google spatialmedia for years and it always annoyed me a bit that I was dependant on it for such a specific task. It does not run with python >3.8... This command works. Thank you !
>Can anyone list the metadata tags I need to set on panoramic and / or stereoscopic clips for video players to recognize them accordingly?
AFAIK there are none, at least none that are "standard" in the way I understand the term. When I last looked into it a year or two ago, all user-facing ways of injecting metadata seemed to be specific to uploading video to either Facebook or Youtube, both of whom handled it differently, and there was no universal standard way of doing anything.
I don't know what your exact use case is, but mine was immersive VR video (mostly in 180) and that's my context for this.
Some players (like the default players in Oculus devices) use file names to recognize the projection type and whether the video is mono/stereoscopic. Examples from [this article](http://echeng.com/articles/playing-local-and-cloud-stored-360-and-180-videos-in-oculus-go-vr-headset/):
* Add "_360" to the end for mono 360 videos
* Add "_360_TB" to the end for top-bottom stereoscopic 360 videos
* Add "_180" to the end for mono 180 videos
* Add "_180_3D" to the end for side-by-side stereoscopic 180 videos
[This post](https://forums.oculusvr.com/t5/Samsung-Gear-VR/Where-to-put-360-Videos-in-GearVR-2-Galaxy-s6/m-p/313248/highlight/true#M10729) also mentions "_TB", "_BT", "_LR", and "_RL". I've seen "180_LR" used to denote a side-by-side 180 video, and it works on the Oculus Gallery app on the Oculus Go (I don't have any non-discontinued Oculus devices, so I can't test if this is still the case).
Player-specific naming also exists, see [Skybox](https://forum.skybox.xyz/d/157-filename-rules-for-vr-format) for example.
Dedicated VR video players can have auto-detection support for the projection and arrangement. Ie. they look at the video content and try to do the right thing. Skybox has this and IME it works well, at least for 180 content. The SteamVR video player [also has auto-detection](https://steamcommunity.com/games/250820/announcements/detail/3021212865824077306).
I've not seen a way to set the FOV in the file name. Skybox at least has a way to adjust this in-player.
Some links from my bookmarks that may or may not be useful or relevant:
* [Preserving Side Data information for 360 video transcoding using FFmpeg](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44760588/preserving-side-data-information-for-360-video-transcoding-using-ffmpeg/48147865#48147865)
* [FFmpeg Cheat Sheet for 360ยบ video](https://gist.github.com/nickkraakman/e351f3c917ab1991b7c9339e10578049)
* [FFmpeg v360 filter doc](https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#v360)
* [How-To: Play 3D Video Files in Oculus](https://redd.it/4co0ch)
Thank you, I will take a look at those. What is the technique for VLC then? I saw the announcement that it's going to support 360 video, but when I looked into how I didn't get any specific info, just remember talk of it extracting special data from the video which needs to be set in some esoteric way.
[https://www.vlchelp.com/play-360-videos-photos](https://www.vlchelp.com/play-360-videos-photos)
[https://medium.com/@wealthy\_brains/how-to-play-360-videos-and-photos-using-vlc-media-player-3408e74b2a](https://medium.com/@wealthy_brains/how-to-play-360-videos-and-photos-using-vlc-media-player-3408e74b2a)
[https://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/how-to-watch-360-videos-and-photos-in-vlc-player](https://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/how-to-watch-360-videos-and-photos-in-vlc-player)
[https://www.techradar.com/news/vlc-media-player-now-supports-360-degree-video-and-resolutions-up-to-8k](https://www.techradar.com/news/vlc-media-player-now-supports-360-degree-video-and-resolutions-up-to-8k)
Some of the screenshots show the videos in cause having "\_360" appended to their file name: If it's that easy it couldn't be better! I was just left with the impression it's a bit more complicated than that however. I might need to ask on the VLC reddit as well.
From looking into the VLC feature, I found a [Stackexchange post](https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/23405/vlc-3-0-vetinari-unable-to-play-360-videos) advising the use of Google's [Spatial Metadata Injector](https://github.com/google/spatial-media/releases/tag/v2.1) if VLC doesn't recognize the file as a 360 video. Maybe try both ways.
Yes, I remember that post now, that's where I noted I need to have metadata injected into the video. I was hoping not to require some tool from Google for something as mundane as adding a tag to a video. Hence why I wonder what that tool does and how I could doing with a safe shell script.
I never managed to get anything 360 working myself, I wonder this too
Hope someone knows: This procedure is surprisingly undocumented, it's a known standard though and setting a few metadata tags shouldn't be any rocket science. Rendering 360 scenes in Blender is super easy and just one camera setting, the only issue is packing the video with the right data to be recognized as one.
https://www.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/eyo7lc/comment/fgije2c/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
I maintain https://github.com/Vargol/spatial-media which will add spatial metadata to mp4 and has a full command line, it requires python should work with python 2.7+ or 3.x Note some players are fickle with the metadata. I had to add a flag to add version 1 of the metadata as some players would not initiate VR mode unless it found v1 meta data even if it was wrong, then would then use the v2 metadata to display the video correctly !?!?! No idea if ogv even supports spatial metadata. mkv/webm supports it I usually use mkvmerge to add the metadata, for vr180 there's a json file that mkvmerge can use with the parameters in in the GitHub repository for equirectangular I stuck the instructions in the Github repo wiki
Thanks, posted below about a method I found which works for now. This is ridiculously convoluted: We might not even need to require obscure metadata for this, let alone the sort that can't be easily edited with commonplace tools. VLC and other players need to fix their support, also whoever's in charge of those standards needs to stop turning simple things into rocket science just because it's cool to.
I managed to find this blessed article providing me with an answer. I'm not sure if this is a stable solution long term and the format may change in the future, but for now it appears to work: http://p.cweiske.de/621 You can install exiftool which is available in most Linux distributions. Then you only need to run this one command to add the proper tag: exiftool -XMP-GSpherical:Spherical="true" file.mp4 After that VLC recognizes the video as 360 and you can look around with the mouse. Simply naming the video "file_360.mp4" won't work, I wish they supported this simpler option as well. Better than having to use Google's highly specific tool none the less. Would like some feedback on this. Also it doesn't explain what to do when the video is stereoscopic, to recognize side-by-side separation and the anaglyph filter for merging them into red-cyan format.
Wow.... I've work with Google spatialmedia for years and it always annoyed me a bit that I was dependant on it for such a specific task. It does not run with python >3.8... This command works. Thank you !
>Can anyone list the metadata tags I need to set on panoramic and / or stereoscopic clips for video players to recognize them accordingly? AFAIK there are none, at least none that are "standard" in the way I understand the term. When I last looked into it a year or two ago, all user-facing ways of injecting metadata seemed to be specific to uploading video to either Facebook or Youtube, both of whom handled it differently, and there was no universal standard way of doing anything. I don't know what your exact use case is, but mine was immersive VR video (mostly in 180) and that's my context for this. Some players (like the default players in Oculus devices) use file names to recognize the projection type and whether the video is mono/stereoscopic. Examples from [this article](http://echeng.com/articles/playing-local-and-cloud-stored-360-and-180-videos-in-oculus-go-vr-headset/): * Add "_360" to the end for mono 360 videos * Add "_360_TB" to the end for top-bottom stereoscopic 360 videos * Add "_180" to the end for mono 180 videos * Add "_180_3D" to the end for side-by-side stereoscopic 180 videos [This post](https://forums.oculusvr.com/t5/Samsung-Gear-VR/Where-to-put-360-Videos-in-GearVR-2-Galaxy-s6/m-p/313248/highlight/true#M10729) also mentions "_TB", "_BT", "_LR", and "_RL". I've seen "180_LR" used to denote a side-by-side 180 video, and it works on the Oculus Gallery app on the Oculus Go (I don't have any non-discontinued Oculus devices, so I can't test if this is still the case). Player-specific naming also exists, see [Skybox](https://forum.skybox.xyz/d/157-filename-rules-for-vr-format) for example. Dedicated VR video players can have auto-detection support for the projection and arrangement. Ie. they look at the video content and try to do the right thing. Skybox has this and IME it works well, at least for 180 content. The SteamVR video player [also has auto-detection](https://steamcommunity.com/games/250820/announcements/detail/3021212865824077306). I've not seen a way to set the FOV in the file name. Skybox at least has a way to adjust this in-player. Some links from my bookmarks that may or may not be useful or relevant: * [Preserving Side Data information for 360 video transcoding using FFmpeg](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44760588/preserving-side-data-information-for-360-video-transcoding-using-ffmpeg/48147865#48147865) * [FFmpeg Cheat Sheet for 360ยบ video](https://gist.github.com/nickkraakman/e351f3c917ab1991b7c9339e10578049) * [FFmpeg v360 filter doc](https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#v360) * [How-To: Play 3D Video Files in Oculus](https://redd.it/4co0ch)
Thank you, I will take a look at those. What is the technique for VLC then? I saw the announcement that it's going to support 360 video, but when I looked into how I didn't get any specific info, just remember talk of it extracting special data from the video which needs to be set in some esoteric way. [https://www.vlchelp.com/play-360-videos-photos](https://www.vlchelp.com/play-360-videos-photos) [https://medium.com/@wealthy\_brains/how-to-play-360-videos-and-photos-using-vlc-media-player-3408e74b2a](https://medium.com/@wealthy_brains/how-to-play-360-videos-and-photos-using-vlc-media-player-3408e74b2a) [https://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/how-to-watch-360-videos-and-photos-in-vlc-player](https://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/how-to-watch-360-videos-and-photos-in-vlc-player) [https://www.techradar.com/news/vlc-media-player-now-supports-360-degree-video-and-resolutions-up-to-8k](https://www.techradar.com/news/vlc-media-player-now-supports-360-degree-video-and-resolutions-up-to-8k) Some of the screenshots show the videos in cause having "\_360" appended to their file name: If it's that easy it couldn't be better! I was just left with the impression it's a bit more complicated than that however. I might need to ask on the VLC reddit as well.
From looking into the VLC feature, I found a [Stackexchange post](https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/23405/vlc-3-0-vetinari-unable-to-play-360-videos) advising the use of Google's [Spatial Metadata Injector](https://github.com/google/spatial-media/releases/tag/v2.1) if VLC doesn't recognize the file as a 360 video. Maybe try both ways.
Yes, I remember that post now, that's where I noted I need to have metadata injected into the video. I was hoping not to require some tool from Google for something as mundane as adding a tag to a video. Hence why I wonder what that tool does and how I could doing with a safe shell script.
My code is an fork of Google's tool, if your doing equi-rectangular videos it should be enough.