I was thinking about this technique too. It would require that the BD player know how to extract the other eye frames...

Oh, I should cover that. The new 3D BD format uses what they are calling Multiview Video Coding (MVC) which is an extension of H.264/AVC video compression (no word from Microsoft on a 3D extension of their VC-1). The extension is coded in such a way, that a non-3D BD player will see only one eye's frames, and get the normal 24/30/60 fps rate instead of the double alternating eyes. It works almost like a second camera angle on a multi-angle disc, but macroblocks and frame prediction information from the primary eye can be used by the second eye's stream. So rather than a 100% increase in storage, they estimate it'll only be about 30%.

...but anyway, if a player knew how to access the second frame, and had enough CPU overhead, it could in theory tint the frames on the fly and combine them into a normal rate video stream which would work with existing TVs, and red/green or red/blue glasses (you could even pick which type of glasses you own, and have the tinting altered to match). I should probably patent this idea, but at least posting it here, it can be referenced as prior art if needed.

My other idea is how to make passive 3D glasses work with a single display, and still have that display work for normal 2D video. In this case the set would have to have support for the 3D, double-rate video. It would buffer the first eye's frame, and when it received the second it would then interlace the two and display them as one frame. Every other line on the set would be polarized either H or V. If the display only had 1080 lines, that would result in a reduction of resolution by half when viewing 3D content. But a 4k display with 2160 lines would only have to perform a horizontal stretch of the picture. Patent this idea too.


Pioneer PDP-5020FD, Marantz SR6011
Axiom M5HP, VP160HP, QS8
Sony PS4, surround backs
-Chris