[hansolo77]

This is all really great info guys! I really appreciate it. Like I said, I'm not in the market but am performing base level research. I'm not sure what your references are as far as Active and Passive 3D. Are you referring to the 3D glasses, being active shutter (and thus require wires running to the player or wireless and requiring batteries) and Passive being a method of polarization? If I'm correct, I would think the Passive would be the better way to go for cost and expandability. I could easily see an active shutter set of glasses would be more expensive than just a polarized filter in the lens. My dad grew up with Active Shutter style 3D and said they're far superior, but I'm not so sure how they would be in a home environment.

Also something I'm not sure about is all the different 3D formats that are out there. When my dad and I were fooling around with his new BluRay player, we found a video addon that streamed 3D stuff (gimmicky type 3D view of earth from the ISS, etc). Since he doesn't have a 3D tv, it showed 2 frames side by side (SBS?). Then in another one video, it showed 2 frames overlapping and slightly off (like Red/Cyan style comics, etc). If I were to purchase a TV, would I be limited to a specific format of 3D? I'm not sure what my movies are that I have, but say they're SBS, would a non-SBS 3D not be able to play it then? Or is this all not even a matter of issue, because the TV can convert whatever signal it receives to be able to output?

[noggin]

This is all really great info guys! I really appreciate it. Like I said, I'm not in the market but am performing base level research. I'm not sure what your references are as far as Active and Passive 3D. Are you referring to the 3D glasses, being active shutter (and thus require wires running to the player or wireless and requiring batteries) and Passive being a method of polarization?

Yes - Active works by the TV or Projector showing alternate frames for each eye, with Active glasses shuttering the 'other' eye. These days they use IR or RF to sync to the display rather than requiring cables. However the flicker of each eye shuttering alternately is quite noticeable to some, and if you are in a room with discharge lighting you can get some very odd effects as the lighting flicker and shutter flicker can interact. The upside of active is that you are using the full resolution of the display for both eye feeds. The glasses are expensive, need to be charged, and if you need lots of people to watch this can be costly.

Passive 3D uses polarisation, usually of alternate lines of the display, along with polarised glasses. This means both eyes are fed simultaneously, but as each line is only seen by one eye, you end up with each eye getting half the vertical resolution of the panel. Passive glasses are cheap so if you have lots of people wanting to watch, you can buy extra pairs at a low cost (Projectors which use passive polarisation work differently and effectively polarise each frame alternately - so have the flicker of active shutters, and the resolution benefit - but also the passive benefit of cheap, and light, glasses)

If I'm correct, I would think the Passive would be the better way to go for cost and expandability. I could easily see an active shutter set of glasses would be more expensive than just a polarized filter in the lens. My dad grew up with Active Shutter style 3D and said they're far superior, but I'm not so sure how they would be in a home environment.

The downside of passive is that you get half the vertical resolution of your panel - if you are using a flat panel display. As a result you get the best results playing 3D HD content on a 3D UHD display.

Also something I'm not sure about is all the different 3D formats that are out there. When my dad and I were fooling around with his new BluRay player, we found a video addon that streamed 3D stuff (gimmicky type 3D view of earth from the ISS, etc). Since he doesn't have a 3D tv, it showed 2 frames side by side (SBS?). Then in another one video, it showed 2 frames overlapping and slightly off (like Red/Cyan style comics, etc). If I were to purchase a TV, would I be limited to a specific format of 3D? I'm not sure what my movies are that I have, but say they're SBS, would a non-SBS 3D not be able to play it then? Or is this all not even a matter of issue, because the TV can convert whatever signal it receives to be able to output?

Blu-rays use MVC encoding which is then output using a frame packed HDMI feed - where both frames for each eye are sent at full resolution (For movies 1920x1080, for some TV stuff 1280x720). Other sources often use HSBS (where the two 1920x1080 eye feeds are 2:1 horizontally squeezed to 960x1080 and put next to each other to create a single 1920x1080 feed, or HTAB where two 1920x540 (or 1280x360) frames are put above and below each other. Most 3D TVs will accept Frame Packed and HSBS/HTAB formats - though in some cases players don't flag HSBS/HTAB Correctly so you have to manually select the 3D mode on your TV.

The Red/Green and similar colour-based system are known as anaglyph, and are designed for viewing on non-3D displays. They are usually disappointing.

[onizuka]

Watching 3D with a SBS 4K source file produced some pretty nice 3D in my opinion. Since open OPENELEC doesn't support it out of the box, I had recode the 3D MVC Bluray to 4K SBS.... The end result for Avatar was surprisingly amazing on my 4KTV. The 3D was running active.

OpenElec (or at least the test builds) DOES support 3D MVC and Frame Packed 24p Full HD 3D output out of the box on a Raspberry Pi 2... (Originally you had to remux to an MVC MKV - i.e. an MKV with both the H264 and MVC streams in it. However recent builds now include basic 3D Bluray ISO support)

I still must do the original method at I'm running a NUC and Chromebox. Kudos to the Pi for achieve native support!