Curious about how to play our 3D encodes? Look no further! Below, you’ll find guides to playing back any of our 3D releases.

 

-3D MKV Playback-

Our 3D releases are encoded as half-resolution side-by-side files and are usually available in 1080p and 720p. We generally suggest the 1080p version even if you only have a 720p 3DTV as the 1080p versions tend to retain a little more detail. Set your 3D display to run in side-by-side mode and put your player in fullscreen mode. We’ve tested this with MPC-HC, but should be compatible with just about any player.

 

The 3D encodes include two subtitle tracks, labeled dual-stream and single-stream respectively. The dual-stream subs include twin sets of subtitles configured at half-width and applied to the left and right halves of the video. When displayed, the subs are stretched, overlapped and delivered identically on both the left and right eye streams. The single-stream subs are simply the standard 2D subs, and are likely not needed, but are included just in case.

 

At this time, we have not released any dual-audio 3D encodes. Should that change in the future, any necessary details will be added.

-Nintendo 3DS AVI Playback-

Don’t have a 3DTV? No problem! Thanks to some research by omniG and an anonymous German encoder, we’ve been able to create 3D AVIs for some of our releases that are compatible with the Nintendo 3DS/3DS XL! As of this post, the New 3DS XL is right around the corner so it hasn’t been tested on that hardware but should be compatible.

 

Unfortunately, due to Nintendo’s archaic codec support, these files are a specially packaged Motion JPEG AVI video stream with hardsubs and an ADPCM audio stream. What this means is that even low-resolution files like these (two 400×240 streams) are 650-700MB for a 7 minute short.

 

So, how do you play these back? Unlike the regular MKVs, there are a few steps you need to take to view them, but the process is fairly painless. As an example, we’ll use our first 3DS release, Digimon Grand Prix, as our example file.

 

• First, take the downloaded 3DS encode (DGP_0001.AVI) and place it on your 3DS SD card in DCIM>100NIN03 (folder numbers here might not be the same, but just put it in the lowest numbered folder and it should work fine).
• Put your SD card back in your 3DS and open the Camera app. Select the “View Photos/Videos” button at the bottom of the lower screen.
• The 3DS should automatically sort the file by date, and because the 3DS encode is dated 1/1/1900, it should appear at the beginning of the list. Before you play it though, click Settings at the bottom right.
• On the Settings page, set “Info Display” to off. Now return to the videos list and select the file.
• The file will start playing, but there will be a small status display in the lower right that will not go away. To work around this, select “Edit Video” on the lower screen. This will give you a clean display. Now you can enjoy a 3D encode on your 3DS!

While the audio has been boosted up a bit, the quality of the audio codec combined with the 3DS speakers results in a less-than-optimal volume level, so we suggest watching 3DS encodes with headphones.

 

That should cover most of the necessary questions about 3D playback, but if we missed anything, feel free to drop by our IRC and we’ll try and help you out!