Can H264/AVC be stereoscopic ?

[Musaran]

Hello, I need expert knowledge.

I am wondering if the H264/AVC format can support stereoscopic video, and if so, is it compatible with monoscopic decoding ?

Or for that matter, if any other video or image codec support that.

I don't mean 2 video streams in a container (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=115995), I do mean analyzing similarities of stereoscopic left and right frames and encoding them in 1 stream to save space.

[fields_g]

So you want MP3's "Joint Stereo" equivalent for video. Interesting.

[odditory]

If you put on a pair of 3d glasses while watching your video I think it will have the same effect.

[Dark Shikari]

I can imagine two ways to do it.

One is to just put the two streams into one video clip and tint them different colors (for red/blue glasses). I've seen this done with H.264.

The other is to have every other frame be from one eye then the next, and have the decoder do the splitting. This would vastly lower the efficiency of H.264's prediction, but it would likely still be considerably better than using two totally separate videos.

[Sagekilla]

What if you interleaved two videos muxer side? use 15 fps for each stream.. But show alternating streams for each eye.

[akupenguin]

The h264 committe has been considering multiview coding. You can follow the current progress at http://ftp3.itu.int/av-arch/jvt-site/

[Musaran]

Thanks, that is what I wanted to know.
(the link is for experts only, but "jvt" does stand for Joint Video Team)

I assume that if it is only developmental on H264, then others codecs don't handle it at all.
I hope it will be made to work, because I am not really looking forward to double storage size.


As for now, the best option seems to double framerate and alternate left/right frames, and relying on temporal reference to get things more right than wrong.