On the forth of January 2011 Nvidia revealed a new Beta driver, which was quite a surprise for me. I’ve been looking for this driver since it was first announced in November 2009. It should bring the capability to support 3D Vision in a windowed mode. So e.g. Google Earth and other windowed application could be used. Periodically I was seeking the web for new rumors or news, but gave up in some point in time last year. But now: Bam! Here it is. And it gets even better. The new driver comes with a new 3D Portal (3dvisionlive.com), which offers a 3D picture and Video gallery – all in a browser windows – just great.
First I’ve installed the Beta driver, and 2 weeks later, as the stable one showed up on 18. of January, I’ve installed this one, too. The Beta driver gave me only after a complete deinstallation of the previous driver the 3D functionality. Whereas the stable one worked out of the box after an installation over the Beta driver.
Playback Issues #1
Unfortunately the ugly error messages didn’t vanish with the stable driver, and I’m getting these errors, after closing the NVIDIA 3D Vision Video Player:
An unexpected error occored. Reason: Access violation at address 77008c19 in module 'ntdll.dll'. Write of address 00000014.
And after clicking away the first one, the second one comes up with an invisible mouse pointer:
An unexpected error occured. Stereo Transformation interface not available!
As you can see version 1.6.4 is installed, and no special decoder (haali-media splitter) or anything else has been used.
My research for a solution haven’t been successful so far. But I’ve figured out, that if you simply wait a few seconds (maybe 10 or so), and close the 3D player afterwards the error messages do not appear.
Playback Issues #2
Some notes on Matroska (.mkv) playback.
I’ve noticed my 3D vision player didn’t play TrueHD or DTSHD sound (both of them 7.1, 8 channels audio output), but VLC did. After some investigations and trial and errors, I’ve found out, it was due to an old Haali Media Splitter installation. I’ve installed the latest version (21. November, 2010, version 1.10.348.15) and the sound was just fine.
If you didn’t allow Haali Media Splitter to intercept the proposed media formats, you have to tell the 3D Vision Media player to use the Haali splitter manually. This is done in the Settings –> Decoder –> MPEG4 Streamsplitter:
I’ve you ask yourself how to switch the different languages, then look for the Haali Splitter icon in your system tray in the lower right corner and left-click it in order to make the Audio selection.
3D-Content
In the meantime far more than 30 titles on 3DBD (3D BluRay Disk) are available in the side-by-side (SBS) format. Just look for 3DBD, SBS and 1080p on Google and you’ll find plenty of links which most of them lead to share-hoster like Rapidshare.com, Netload.in or Share-online.biz (there are of course far more of then out there). You need a smart downloading tool like JDownloader, though. Yes – it looks like the torrent scene is dead regarding this genre – because people are afraid of being caught. A file-hoster offer sometimes far more convenience and speed without the risk of being caught, and the titles are published there first – by far. People who’ve been caught because they’ve rendered themselves liable to prosecution and had to deal with law enforcement set the appropriate sign for this development. So Pandora’s box is open for the 3D-genre also – Well done again – content industry! Have fun!
A word on Linux and 3D
This blog had always a big focus on Linux, but unfortunately 3D Vision support for Linux doesn’t exist. That’s not quite true, since the 3D Vision Pro support exists for Nvidia’s Quatro series. But we are talking here about cards, which are unbelievable expensive and as far as I understand the ‘Pro’ Version, they are based on a radio signal for synchronizing the glasses and they are in no way compatible to the stock 3D Vision brand. Because of this, there won’t be news regarding Linux and 3D on this blog. Sorry!
