bino – viewing 3d stereo videos with linux

December 31st 2010

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: [download#51]

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: [download#50] Download the modified overlay (it includes the patch) and extract it in /usr/local/portage. Be sure to include the following line in your /etc/make.conf:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

Then emerge bino and enjoy viewing your 3d movies.

Jürgen