How to Watch 3D Movies in VR (HTC Vive / Oculus Rift)

Hello blog fans,

This week we have a practical blog post on how you can watch your 3D Blu Ray movies on your VR headset. This one will work on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.

The main reason I'm writing this post is because I scoured the internet trying to work how to do this. I was trying out loads of different movie players including VLC, Media Player Classic, Stereoscopic Player, DeoPlayer, Vive Cinema and loads of different ripping and transcoding software including Brorsoft, DVDFab, Handbrake, MakeMKV, etc...

In the end, the solution I found is relatively simple, although a little time consuming. But more importantly, I did not find this method anywhere on the Internet, it is a lot less complicated and cheaper than most of them and some of them didn't even work for me! Believe me, I must have looked in a hundred different places and not one of them highlighted this particular method.

This solution is better than any of the others I have found on the internet in that

1. It actually works, and the only other methods that worked for me are ones that required expensive re-encoding software.
2. It is cheaper than most, if not all, of the other methods. Stereoscopic Player is cheaper at 49 EUR than the non-free video encoders that other methods use to convert MVC 3D movies into SBS (Side by Side) format.
3. It is quicker. Although you need to spend an hour ripping the movie off the Blu Ray, you have to do that anyway. Unlike other methods, this way of playing your movies does not require you to re-encode your movies, and this will save you having to wait another 4+ hours after you have ripped the movie.

So what better blog post to make then a new and simple way to watch your 3D Blu Rays on your VR headset!

Step 1 - Get the Software

You need 3 free bits of software to watch your Blu Rays on your VR headset.

1. MakeMKV (with beta key here)
2. Stereoscopic Player
3. Bigscreen Beta on Steam.

A few words about these applications.

1. The whole time I've known of MakeMKV is that it is free whilst it is in Beta, which is forever so far. All you need to make sure you do is get and register the latest beta key, because they expire every month.
2. Stereoscopic Player is only free for 30 days, after that you you do need to buy a registration key. This software provides the magic sauce over other so-called howtos on playing 3D Blu Rays in VR, because it can play MVC 3D titles, no need to convert your Blu Rays to SBS. If anyone finds a free way to play MVC 3D movies as SBS output then let me know!
3. Bigscreen Beta takes Stereoscopic Player and presents it in full 3D in your own VR movie theatre, it looks great!

Step 2 - Rip the Blu Ray

Unfortunately, because Blu Rays are encrypted, Stereoscopic Player can't play straight off the disc, so you need to use MakeMKV to do a straight rip of the movie to your hard drive.

1. Run MakeMKV and put the Blu Ray in the drive. Once the drive recognises the disc, press the large Blu-Ray Disc icon on MakeMKV to open the Blu Ray.
2. Now MakeMKV will present you with a lots of options of what to rip. The Blu Ray disc may have multiple titles, in which case make sure you are working with the biggest one in size, as this will be the main movie. I recommend you expand all the arrows so you can be very clear about what you are choosing to rip.
3. You need to make sure you tick the MVC-3D box for Video under the standard Mpeg4 Video line, otherwise you will only rip the video for the left-eye, the MVC track contains the right-eye video. Also, select an audio track, it's up to you but I tend to go for the 7.1 Surround option for best possible audio.
4. Then you can pretty much untick everything else, although you can of course choose other language soundtracks or subtitles if you want.
5. With everything correctly ticked or unticked, proceed to rip the movie by clicking on the MakeMKV button on the right-side of the application.

Once you click the button, then you come across the only downside to this method because it takes around an hour to rip the movie to the hard drive so you can play it. If anyone can find a method where you can play an MVC movie straight off a Blu Ray disc then let me know!

Step 3 - Play the Movie in SBS Mode

The reason we don't have to convert the movie to SBS (or Side-By-Side) mode, is because Stereoscopic player will take an MVC 3D encoded movie as input and play it as SBS on output. Playing the movie in SBS mode is what allows Bigscreen to show it in 3D.

1. Ignore the option "Open Left and Right File" because this is for when you have a seperate movie file for the left eye and one for the right eye. Actually, on the Blu Ray itself they are seperate files, but we merged them together when we ripped with MakeMKV. So just chose the regular "Open File" option to open your movie.
2. With the default options, the movie will play as an analgyph picture. This is when you have different coloured images for left eye and right eye and you need those old fashioned blue and red 3d glasses to watch them. We don't want to watch the movie like this, so go into File → Settings.
3. Select "Playback Options" and change "Viewing Method" to "Side by Side for 3D-TVs". When you click OK, you will see 2 images appear side by side. They will look stretched but this is okay, because BigScreen needs the image this way so it looks properly on your headset.

Step 4 - Run BigScreen and Select SBS Mode

Here's the final piece of the puzzle, Bigscreen can take SBS video on your desktop and play it as 3D in your bigscreen virtual movie theatre.

With the movie playing in SBS mode, run BigScreen and put on your headset. Use the controller to select the screen icon on the Bigscreen control panel, that says "Customise your screen" when you point at it. Then select SBS. Et voila, you should see the movie playing in 3D on the big screen in front of you.

If you are still in the default room in Bigscreen, which is the lounge, I recommend changing it to the next room in the list, which is the home theatre room. This is the ideal way to watch the movie in your headset.

Result!

So there we are, how to watch your 3D Blu Rays in VR. Unfortunately you do need to rip the disc, which takes an hour, but you don't need to convert it, which would probably take another 4!

Don't forget to delete the movie when you are finished, because you are probably using 40GB of space for a typical 3D movie. :)

Enjoy!

The Horror Genre in VR

Hello VR seekers,

VR seems to especially fire the imagination in some areas. To be frank, porn is one of them. No great surprise there I guess but this isn't something I'll be writing about at any time.

I mention porn, only because in the film world, I use that word with another entire movie genre, the horror movie!

Talking About Horror

The Thing - one of the all-time classics

I'm not a big fan of horror movies because I feel most movies are really horror porn. What I do mean? Well, I mean the plot is thin, the story is generally unbelievable and you get entire movies which are totally derived and only exist as a platform to try and scare or gross you out.

That's not to say there aren't good horror movies out there, but for me it is mainly restricted to some classics: Films like Alien and The Thing, these are movies that are really good in their own right and they just happen to scare or horrify as well. There are other movies I like as well, such as some of the old Hammer Horror movies, but they are so old that, from a point of view of causing scares, they are lame by today's standards. You don't watch the really old films any more because you want to be scared.

I find Nightmare on Elm Street is okay, but here we are already slipping back to the horror porn genre, with the likes of Hellraiser and Friday the 13th. The original Poltergeist is okay but it is an anomaly for me, there is something unique about that movie that turned it into the cult classic it is.

Why am I telling you all this? I want to give you the context for how I feel about horror in general because it's really important to understand where I am coming from when it comes to horror in VR.

Horror in VR

I must admit, I haven't tried a great deal, in particular I am still restricting myself to the free samples out there, but I do have an ambition to buy Resident Evil 7 VR when it hopefully comes to the PC in 2018 and that ambition is boosted by my experiences so far.. and that is coming from someone who is not a big fan of horror in general. You can probably start to sense where the rest of this blog post is going.....

So I tried the following 2 very short horror games, both available on Steam.

• The Abbot's Book
• The Bellows

The monk in The Abbot's Book

The Abbot's Book professes to be a snippet of a much larger 8 episode game, with a snippet of the 7th episode forming the demo. That's great, but there's precious little information about when the full game (or even episode 1) is going to come out, but that doesn't matter. The setting for the game is the role of an Italian aristocrat who owns an estate associated with a myth about an old evil God. In the demo you play said aristocrat as he is about to go down into catacombs that run under his estate, bringing with you some local monk who apparently believes none of it.

The Bellows doesn't really explain much about the setting. You wake up in a dark room and start off by looking out a window, which immediately gives you the impression you are in some kind of large building like a mansion. Then as you start creeping through the place you realise you are in what looks like an old asylum.

To be honest, the settings don't really make difference to my review. There are a lot of parallels between both games. Similarities are as follows.

• You are defenseless
• You are limited to moving around quite slowly
• Both games are very moodily lit with infrequent light sources and lots of dark corners

What are the differences?

• The Abbot's Book is a bit more sophisticated than The Bellows in that you have another character following you around, the monk. This character forms a typical mechanic in movies, which is the unbeliever or the innocent or ignorant party. He basically allows another person to explain to him what is going on, which of course fills in the viewer at the same time.
• The other cool addition to Abbot's Book is that it is actually your character that fills in the monk, you hear yourself talking to the monk, explaining things to him, and the game gives you the chance to tailor your replies with some simple options.
• Another difference between the 2 games is that The Abbot's Book relies on a slow-operating blink system for movement (i.e. teleportation) and The Bellows gives you free direct (and slow) movement.

So Where is This Going?

Fancy having a face-off with this fellow do you?

The 2 final similarities between the 2 games sum up my feelings on the Horror genre in VR.

Firstly, both of these games are filled with very old school tried cliches of horror. Things flying around on their own, dark corners with hints of movement, images appearing and then suddenly disappearing, things suddenly moving next to you with sudden sound effects designed to make you jump. Really, if you watching a movie rather than playing in VR, you'd be thinking this is tired old crap and turning it off.

So the second similarity, the VR experience turns the tired old cliches on the head, because you are actually there! Some of the mechanics are still quite tame, flying furniture gets old really quickly, but the slow moving around, the dark corners everywhere, the really odd sounds you hear behind you... These tired old cliches take new life in VR.....

Because you are right there in it all. There's no hiding behind the couch here, there's no respite from the suspense, that dark corner or room you can see, or rather can't see anything in? Yeah, you've got to walk into that. It's quiet different having a pitch black view on a TV then having pitch black all around you, whilst you are waiting for what happens next.

The biggest, BIGGEST frights I got, were the ones where you are being approached by a malevolent character. In one experience, there is a character you see throughout the game doing really horrible stuff, this character keeps appearing again and again, and at one stage he comes for you. You are there paralysed in fright whilst he moves purposely towards you. That one is quite the hair raiser. In the absolute biggest frightener however, there is a moment when this human-like figure with a mutant face jumps out from nowhere and right in your face, so you turn away and HE IS STILL RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU, YOU STEP AND LEAN BACK, REELING AWAY BUT HE IS STILL RIGHT THERE. Then he disappears and you breathe a massive sigh of relief. As someone who doesn't scare that easily, I have to say this one really got my heart racing.

Horror Movies and Horror VR - Not the Same!

So this is why the film review at the start was so important. When it comes to horror in the movies, a lot of it is plot-thin tired old cliches. In VR, however, none of that matters. It doesn't matter if you think you know what happens next, because it is you in this place, not some movie character on a screen.

I'm a VR horror believer. This is why I'm keen to try Resident Evil 7. This is why I'm now going to be looking at other horror VR experiences! If you have a VR headset and you haven't tried out these games yet, you need to do so or you are missing out.

Maybe don't try them if you have a heart condition though.