3D Is Here!

I already have arguably the best television for 3D movie viewing that can be had, a nice 55" passive 3D Panasonic, but now I have an additional option for watching my 3D movies. I bought a Quest 2 a while back, bought a few games and apps for it, but never really used it much. It's a very lonely device to use, with your visual senses reduced to a pixelated grid.

But Claude.ai has changed all that. I randomly ask Claude questions and on Sunday I asked it how I could turn my 3D blu rays into 3D mp4 files. And it answered! Apparently I can use MakeMKV to backup my discs with 3D information preserved, then use an app called "BD3D2MK3D" to convert it to a side-by-side mkv file, and finally use ffmpeg to convert it to mp4 which is actually pretty quick because you can just reuse the mkv's video stream and re-encode the audio to aac.

I have a couple of spare Windows lappies so I set one up to be my 3D blu ray conversion station. Works a treat! Above is a still from "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters". While the viewing experience on the Quest 2 is not as good as on my television it's nice to have options.

An additional benefit is now I can order European region-locked 3D blu rays and watch them after converting them. It seems that other parts of the world still have some support for 3D media. US America seems to have given up on it though.

I think I may get a paid subscription to Claude. I ask it questions all the time, it has sort of replaced "googling" things.