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.
VLC coming soon?
skybox
Judging by how iOS STILL doesn’t natively support WebM, I suppose it will never have support outside specific apps.
So fucking annoying to find a good meme and send it on Signal, only to see my friend reply “doesn’t play” for the hundredth time.
Fuck Apple.
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.
This was sort of my thought–just convert and move on.
according to my quick googling, it can play some but not all media files…
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.
Which app?
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.
No, the article is wrong. I’ve played a bunch of videos, 2D and 3D, and it works fine. The players that launched in the App Store are the issue.
Can’t handle a lot of them, yes. In very typical Apple fashion, they’re overpricing tech that lacks basic features of its competitors.
that’s what I really wondered myself. I understand apps and such, but you can’t just play video?
Probably. Whatever standard governs side by side video likely isn’t supported in Safari.