Recently I wrote about bino, a stereoscopic video player that is usable with linux and also supports quad buffered stereo. In the meanwhile the versions 0.9.1 and 0.9.2 have been released. The new version includes multithreading to read, decode, and display video data in parallel, for better performance and some bugfixes.

Bino still does not work properly with linux, at least it still does not display anything on my gentoo box. The patch for bino, I provided here, does not work anymore.

Problems

At least on my gentoo box bino failed to display anything. When starting bino  it failed with a window popping up:

Cannot set GL context format

The reason for this was the same as before. Bino was requesting an alpha visual, which did not succeed. I have not seen the point in requiring an alpha visual for bino, so I just removed this. You may download the patch from here:

Addon: The patch is only necessary when the X server does not provide an alpha visual, which may i.e. be the case when using only 16 bits of colour  depth.

Getting things to work

Download Bino from here: bino-0.9.2.tar.xy and extract it.

tar -xf bino-0.9.2.tar.xz

Afterwards apply my patches and compile Bino.

cd bino-0.9.2

patch -p0 < bino-0.9.2-quad-buffered-stereo.patch

./configure

make

make install

The Gentoo way

For gentoo users here is my overlay including the ebuild:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

Then emerge bino and enjoy viewing your 3d movies again.

Jürgen

Posted in 3d, gentoo, linux, multimedia | 1 Comment »

Last year I wrote about bino, a stereoscopic video player that is usable with linux and also supports quad buffered stereo. In the meanwhile the versions 0.8 and 0.8.1 have been released. Thanks  for your work, Martin. The new versions contain some bug fixes and the following new features:

• Adjustable ghostbusting to reduce crosstalk artifacts.
• Parallax adjustment.
• Mouse-based seeking.
• Initial support for choosing an audio stream.
• Improved compatibility with many video types.

Bino still does not work properly with linux, at least it does not display anything on my gentoo box. The good news is that my patch for bino, I provided here, still works.

The Gentoo way

For gentoo users here is my overlay including the ebuild:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

Then emerge bino and enjoy viewing your 3d movies.

Jürgen

Posted in 3d, gentoo, linux, multimedia, Uncategorized | No Comments »

A while ago I updated the stereocopic mplayer patch to work again with newer mplayer versions. This patch worked to display side by side stereo movies in quad buffered stereo mode but it did not enable mplayer to display stereo videos consisting of two separate video streams for the right and the left eye like those produced with Fujifilm Real 3D cameras.  A player capable of displaying these files and many other stereoscopic movie formats is bino. I recognized that bino is also capable of displaying a single video stream in quad buffered stereo mode. For a future version it would be really nice to have it calculating a 3D version of the stream on the fly and displaying this fake stereo video. There are some algorithms known that are capable of doing this calculation. It should be possible to do this in parallel on the GPU, so processing power should not be the problem… Of course such a fake stereo video cannot have the quality of a real stereo one, but it may be the only possibility to watch ones favorite movie in stereo.

Problems

At least on my gentoo box bino failed to display anything. When requesting quad buffered stereo (bino -o stereo) it failed with:

bino: [err] display does not support stereo mode

When trying to start bino without quad buffered stereo it failed with:

bino: [err] cannot set GL context format

The reason for this was found quickly. Bino was requesting an alpha visual, which did not succeed. I have not seen the point in requiring an alpha visual for bino, so I just removed this. You may download the patch from here:

Current patches for can be found here.

Getting things to work

Download Bino from here: bino-0.7.tar.xy and extract it.

tar -xf bino-0.7.tar.xz

Afterwards apply my patch and compile Bino.

cd bino-0.7

patch -p0 < bino-0.7-quad-buffered-stereo.patch

./configure

make

make install

The Gentoo way

For gentoo users here is my overlay including the ebuild:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

Then emerge bino and enjoy viewing your 3d movies.

Jürgen

Posted in 3d, gentoo, linux, multimedia | 2 Comments »

I recently received my VR920 3D stereo glasses from USA. A detailed review of the device can be found here : Introducing the Vuzix iWear VR920. A photo of the VR920 can be seen below:

The device of course works flawlessly using Windows. The situation under Linux is a bit different, due to missing driver support from the manufacturer, as usual.

Stereo vision works at least with nvidia quadro boards, probably also with others. I.e. Ati FireGL should work, but I never tried this. Setting this up was easy. I only had to start a second XServer and add the line

Option “Stereo” “1″

into the screen section of its xorg.conf. With this setting you get a different image for both eyes and thus real stereo vision if your application supports quad-bufferred stereo. It is important that the screen resolution is between 640×480 and 1024×768 and the refresh rate is 60 Hz. The xorg.conf you are using for this must not use the composite extension. For disabling the Composite extension append the following to the xorg.conf:

Section “Extensions”
Option         “Composite” “Disable”
EndSection

Sadly this also prevents the use of compiz, hopefully Nvidia fixes the incompatibility between stereo and the composite extension some day.

For starting the xserver i use the following little script, which opens 2 xterms and starts the program (given as parameter with arguments) in one of them.

#!/bin/bash

/usr/X11R6/bin/X :1 -dpi 96 -xf86config ./xorg.conf.3d -auth /var/gdm/:1.Xauth vt8 &
DISPLAY=:1.0
export DISPLAY
sleep 5
icewm&
hotkeys&
xterm -fn 9×15&
xterm -fn 9×15 -e $@&

The headphone gets detected as alsa device:

usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 8
usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
generic-usb 0003:1BAE:0002.0002: hiddev0,hidraw1: USB HID v1.00 Device [Icuiti Corp. VR920 Video Eyewear] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-2/input3
usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1bae, idProduct=0002
usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
usb 2-2: Product: VR920 Video Eyewear
usb 2-2: Manufacturer: Icuiti Corp.
usbcore: registered new interface driver snd-usb-audio

cat /proc/asound/cards:

1 [ Eyewear ]: USB-Audio – VR920 Video Eyewear
Icuiti Corp. VR920 Video Eyewear at usb-0000:00:1d.1-2, full speed

I was able to get mplayer to play on the device by setting the output device to hw=1,0 .

Sadly the mixer does not seem to work. At least the mixer levels are not controllable. Perhaps any alsa developer has an idea for this? It is even more important since the mixer control wheel at the device freezes after three steps when using linux.

More important than having controllable sound is to get the integrated headtracking to work. There is a non-working driver at vuzix forums. At least it can read the sensor data from the device but does not seem to handle the data correctly. I will look into this soon.

Update: My VR920 headtracking driver is now available here: VR920 headtracking driver for Linux

Playing with the device I had to find out that there is no jps stereoimage viewer for linux. The only programm I found, which is able to read jps-images, is gqview (GQView3D). Sadly gqview is not able to display theese images using active quad-buffered stereo. Thus I decided to write my own jps viewer. It will be based upon OpenSceneGraph (OpenSceneGraph) since I have some experience in OpenSceneGraph development. Perhaps I can integrate headtracking into it. Would be really cool to view a sea panorama image in 3D by turning the head

Stay tuned for updates.

Jürgen

Posted in 3d, hardware, linux | 22 Comments »