Today's guest post is from Alok Ahuja, who is Technical Lead for 3D Vision at NVIDIA.
Spearheaded by Hollywood, there has been growing interest in the past year to provide immersive 3D movie-viewing experiences on the web. At the same time, the number and quality of 3D-capable video camcorders on the market is growing fast, resulting in more 3D content creation. In parallel, adoption of WebM video in HTML5 has also increased. For NVIDIA, these trends highlighted the need for a solution that would enable users to watch 3D WebM videos on the web.
Today, we're happy to announce that users can enjoy 3D WebM videos on NVIDIA 3D Vision™ enabled desktop and notebooks PC. We're achieved 3D WebM support by adding stereo flags to the WebM file container, which is a subset of Matroska's stereo 3D support. You can encode 3D WebM videos using the sample VP8 encoder or FFmpeg.
NVIDIA collaborated with Mozilla to enable 3D WebM playback in HTML5 <video> in Firefox 4. Now, you can use a standard HTML5 video player to watch 3D content using NVIDIA 3D Vision PC, or even on your HDMI 1.4 3D TVs with NVIDIA 3DTV Play™ software. We've also worked closely with YouTube to support WebM versions of YouTube 3D videos. Starting today, if you select the HTML5 3D viewing option on YouTube, most of the 3D videos that play in Firefox 4 will be WebM. You can also serve these videos on your website. For example, a YouTube 3D feed is available on NVIDIA's 3D Vision streaming website, 3DVisionLive.com.
3D video production is poised to expand much more rapidly and with it the need arises for a robust ecosystem for 3D content encoding and high-quality playback. We're excited to be a part of this ecosystem through our support for 3D WebM.