Anaglyph and general questions - please help a newbie!

[nicooke]

I'm running an htpc base don the AMD Zacate platform, which gives me 1.6ghz dual core cpu with a decent AMD APU capable of happily decoding half-sbs 1080p x264 streams.

I've done my research and as my tv is an LG 60hz 42inch LCD set, I can't run shutters.

As a result I got one of these:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2D-3D-Video-C ... 4360wt_949

... which takes in the sbs and outputs a single amber/blue anaglyph.

The glasses provides are the very dark, Colorcode style glasses.

Trying these with pre-encoded Colorcode content, the 3d effect is surprisingly good - a tiny amount of ghosting but lots of depth - very happy.

The box linked above does do a very good job - it happily and effortlessly transforms the sbs into amber/blue. However, I noticed a fair amount of ghosting.

Closing one eye, I'm seeing some of the amber come through the blue lense, and the same the other way - the blue is definitely creeping through the amber lense. There seems to be no way in SBS mode of altering the convergence of the two images.

As such my question is this - what is the best way to minimise the ghosting?

I have some glasses on order from Amazon that may or may not have better filters, but this remains to be seen.

Can anyone suggest really good anaglyph glasses for this purpose? I can't help feeling the converter box is putting out more yellow than amber, or if altering colour settings on the tv/reducing sharpness, etc would help at all?

Also if there are suggestions for an improved way to do this on a 60hz set then please let me know. A cheap gpu is not out of the question but would be required to be ow profile.

Please also note this is not used for gaming at present, but for movies.

As an addendum, the APU is DirectX 11 compatible - I did ty stereoscopic player but it doesn't seem to graphically accelerate the video so it is very very jerky. Bino3D doesn't accelerate at all so that is no real use as the CPUs aren't up to the task.

I hope this is enough information - I am a newbie here so please let me know if further details are required. Also, I am based in the UK so getting lots of glasses is a bit trickier.

[Guig2000]

I think there is only one manufacturer of colorcode glasses and anyway you describe a usual issue with all anaglyph systems. So I don't think there is a way to lower crosstalk on your system. Maybe you're just unlucky and the primary colors of your TV don't match the colors of colorcode glasses. Also, considering to use anaglyph systems for a long duration usage is an error on my mind.

[nicooke]

I did think the glasses may not match the colour of my tv - though I can likely alter this in the AMD Catalyst settings.

I don't set the ghosting on actual Colorcode encodes - but obviously blue/yellow isn't really Colorcode as Colorcode uses extra filtering.

I'm sure this must be solvable - I literally just this second received the other glasses so will try them out tonight.

Still very grateful for any replies and suggestions

[Guig2000]

Changing colors on the ccc will not help, at the contrary it may be worst. Because you can't change the primary colors of your TV. Primary colors are made by the color filters that are into the sub-pixels of the screen. When you use a icc profile or change the colors into graphic card driver, it means it will not send pure colors to the screen, for example, instead of send pure red it will send lot of red + some green and some blue, but the basic red green blue colors of the screen are still the same.

Maybe you could choice red/blue glasses instead because you will found more manufacturers but don't attempt to have a miracle.

But the true problem seems that your converter does not seems to provide real color code but a amber/blue that approximatively match colorcode instead.

[nicooke]

Thanks Guig - you are right in that it doesn't produce colorcode (as it is obviously patented), but I though by changing the colour in ccc just a little it may stop the glasses leaking that particular bit of colour through.

Of course I'm pretty newbish so just trying to understand. Will try these other glasses tonight and see how they match the tv - blue lense looks nearer what I see on the tv without the glasses...

I did try the red/blue but that appears to have a bit of ghosting as well. I have a separate pair of these too - the glasses I have were bundled and I suspect the filters were pretty cheap...

[cybereality]

If you can use red/cyan with that box, then I would recommend buying a pair of Pro-Ana glasses. They have very little ghosting, however all anaglyph glasses will have some ghosting on them.

[nicooke]

Thanks Cybereality.

I've been playing more with this and decided to give stereoscopic player trial another shot in yellow/blue.

The good news is that it isn't a mismatch between my glasses and my tv - in fact using stereoscopic player the result is stunning - things flying out of the screen, floating in front of the tv - excellent.

I will be buying this software the moment I can convince it to decode the mpeg2 streams in my SBS mkv's in hardware, as the dual core on the Zacate is struggling. It doesn't help that I was trying to convince it to decode h264 in some wierd and wacky way - guess I should look at the video file properties first!

The bad news is that this box is utterly useless for the intended purpose, and I will be requesting a refund.

I'm sure I will have more questions but thank you for your help so far.

EDIT: Refund has been confirmed And looks like the Elecard MPEG2 decoder can decode streams via DXVA so this should all be very very smooth assuming stereoscopic player doesn't introduce any strangeness to proceedings.

[nicooke]

Update - finally got the IZ3D driver working with a custom Colorcode matrix, which seems to be allowing the GPU to decode the video - so 1080P anaglyph working pretty smoothly with no cash outlay apart from the glasses. It is actually surprisingly good - only thing I've noticed is on whites or fast motion I still see a little blue/yellow but other than that no complaints!

Thanks for the help everyone. Next challenge is getting xbmc to launch IZ3D player - it doesn't like sharing the D3D fullscreen output I don't think.

[szape]

Update - finally got the IZ3D driver working with a custom Colorcode matrix, which seems to be allowing the GPU to decode the video - so 1080P anaglyph working pretty smoothly with no cash outlay apart from the glasses. It is actually surprisingly good - only thing I've noticed is on whites or fast motion I still see a little blue/yellow but other than that no complaints!

Thanks for the help everyone. Next challenge is getting xbmc to launch IZ3D player - it doesn't like sharing the D3D fullscreen output I don't think.

Can you tell me exactly how did you do it?

Regards.

[nicooke]

Sure, which bit?

The custom matrix is pretty easy - and I believe info is already in the IZ3D forums, along with a custom matrix.

I've actually taken to recoding my movies now using Virtualdub, but the key to XBMC launching IZ3D player is to map your network share to a drive - the player doesn't like being fed the network path bu XBMC but a mapped drive works fine.