YouTube Inadvertently Harms 3D Library

[PressBot]

It's amazing how YouTube jumped ahead of the curve in online 3D broadcasting, and without warning, slipped off the road into the tar pit.  Credit to Cybereality for catching this!



In an effort to standardize 3D uploads, YouTube is falling in line with "squished" side by side formatting for 3D uploads.  Normally, a 3D video is uploaded in double width format: 2560X720 is the 3D equivalent of 1280X720.  It's double width so that the left and right views don't lose image quality.  Squished side by side format looks similar, but the left and right views need to fit in the same space that a 2D image would fit in, so a 1280X720 3D image would still have to be rendered at 1280X720, and the 3D display scales the images to proper size, but may appear granier because of the missing information.

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[cybereality]

Yeah, this is really sad. They could have easily made an effort to continue legacy support and, to a certain extent, they did (provided you happened to upload in the squished format). But they have tons of servers and processing power. They could have converted all the full-res 3D videos into the frame-compatible format (or maybe make some process where users could initiate this conversion themselves). Or they could have maintained the older player and YT3D tags for "grandfathered" members with videos before the cut-off date. We are the ones that made YouTube3D what it is today, and it kinda sucks for them to just trash so many of our videos without any warning.

[Likay]

[BlackShark]

All my YT3D videos with the tags still work perfectly.
Did you try with the aspect ratio tag ?
yt3d:aspect=16:9
yt3d:aspect=16:10
yt3d:aspect=4:3
etc...

My content using the advanced yt3d:left and yt3d:right tags also still work perfectly.

From my channel, it seems Youtube has not deleted any of it's features, it has just modified it's default behaviour when you don't enter the tags.
Youtube also never supported full resolution side by side. Whenever you did that, Youtube downsized and letterboxed the video until it fits the standard 16:9 frame.

[Likay]

I'm not entirely clear about the news. I got the impression that the sourcefile is altered into a squished format even when downloading the original format. I've just tried downloading one of my owns and they do keep the original aspects so nothing wrong here. Maybe it's just for some kind of encodings?

[cybereality]

YouTube did, in fact, and maybe still does support full resolution side-by-side 3D videos. I have uploaded these myself, as have other people (here is an example at 3840x1080 which is clearly much better quality than all the frame-compatible videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpK7r4G0wYo" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ). You could upload in any size you wish, provided you had the "yt3d:aspect=16:9" tag. It seems there is actually legacy support provided and this error I was seeing on my videos might just be a bug.

BUT THERE IS A WORK-AROUND!!!!

You need to change the aspect ratio, ever so slightly. So assuming you are using a 720P/1080P video at 16:9, use this tag:

yt3d:aspect=15.99:9

For some unknown reason, that will restore the video to the way it used to work. They must have some hard-coded check for the 16:9 aspect ratio and are doing something funky. Still a rather annoying bug, but at least there is a simple solution. I have already did this "hack" on those couple of videos I uploaded at full res, and they work fine now. See:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuoGMBv7pl0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;