Hi there folks. I bought a RED Hydrogen One for one purpose and one purpose only: to watch 3D movies on the go glasses-free. Since AFAIK, there aren’t any official instructions out there on how to convert your 3D Blu-Ray rips to be watchable on your RED Hydrogen One (or other device that runs LeiaPlayer) I had to come up with my own method. And here it is.
The program for actually ripping physical 3D Blu-Rays that worked for me is called BD3D2MK3D. You’ll have to figure that part out on your own. What you get at the end of ripping your 3D Blu-Ray is an mkv file containing an h264 video stream and usually either DTS or TrueHD audio.
The h264 is fine but LeiaPlayer can’t play mkv and can’t automatically downmix to stereo from DTS or TrueHD the way VLC Media Player can on your PC. You need to shift your container format to mp4 and you need to downmix your audio to stereo AAC in order to watch the movie on LeiaPlayer on RED Hydrogen One. You also need to rename it, since LeiaPlayer will only activate the 3D mode for files that end with “_half_2x1.mp4”
To do this conversion, you need ffmpeg and my batch scripts. Just get the Windows binary (.exe) of ffmpeg and place it in the same folder on your PC with the batch scripts. Then you can drag your video file onto the batch script in Windows Explorer to start the conversion. (if you aren’t using Windows then you’re already tech savvy enough to read the script and figure out how to do it for your OS)
Two batch scripts are provided. “3dify-REDHydrogenOneStereo.bat” is for 3D movies that are already just stereo, while “3dify-REDHydrogenOneDownmix.bat” is for 3D movies with DTS or TrueHD surround sound. It does a nice downmix to stereo for you. Sometimes ffmpeg shows warnings about audio potentially getting the wrong timecodes, but those are just warnings, not errors.
I’ve converted a few different movies this way and it works pretty good. I believe these scripts could be tweaked further to reduce the file size by lowering the audio bitrate.
I went down that road myself, but I decided to go for ease. DVDFab’s Blu-ray Ripper is able to rip 3D Blu-ray discs right to .mp4 files. I’ve been quite pleased with the results.
Thank you so much for this. I’m in the same camp – bought it purely to watch movies, and I was on the verge of returning it after trying a few things… but this instantly worked. Cheers mate.
[quote=“cml93, post:4, topic:1231, full:true”]
Thank you so much for this. I’m in the same camp – bought it purely to watch movies, and I was on the verge of returning it after trying a few things… but this instantly worked. Cheers mate.
[/quote]Yeah it took a while to figure out.
I’d be interested to find out what else the RED Hydrogen One can do with its 3D screen. Like maybe could it be used to view 19th century stereograms or Ray Zone’s 3D comics? Would love to see a thread on that if anyone knows how to get that to work.
I believe that there must be an ffmpeg filter that could do this with the right settings but I don’t know what it actually is. Try looking for help from ffmpeg forums or IRC.
Marc, i’m trying out the dvdfab software have almost got it dialed in but i have one trial rip left. would you be able to tell me what settings you use?
I’m sorry to say that I don’t have the options available at this time. My DVDFab 1-year subscription expired, and the application doesn’t even want to show me the Blu-ray settings.
I don’t recall setting anything really funny. The only things I think I might’ve tweaked would’ve been in terms of video quality, exchanging more processing time for a better output (i.e., 2-pass processing).