3D Movie Formats?

[FanIn80]

So I just bought a 3D plasma with a couple pairs of glasses for it. I'm curious about what kind of things I should be looking for in media files? Half SBS? Full SBS? Anaglyph?

It seems I know very little about this 3D stuff...

[SebC]

Avoid anaglyph like the plague (that's the red-blue stuff that almost killed 3D decades ago, and doesn't make any use of the 3D part of your 3DTV). Half SBS is usually the one considered to be the "3DTV" format, I believe some TVs can use flash drives for that. It's the format that 3D broadcasts use, because it fits the 3D signal into a 2D frame. If you have a Blu-Ray player, you can also burn ISOs. Full SBS is higher res than half SBS, but you need to play it with a computer. Stereoscopic Player (from 3dtv.at - it's also licensed to nVdida for 3D Vision) is the universal decoder that handles stuff like Full SBS, Over-Under and Multi-stream, the advantage of those formats being higher resolution. Think it's PC only though, as are the iz3d drivers, nVidia 3DTV Play, and other 3D content creation and display tools.

[FanIn80]

Awesome, thanks dude. Much appreciated!

[SebC]

Oh and 3DTV play also supports 3D Blu-Ray playback with Arcsoft/CyberDVD for direct playback of ISOs, but it's restricted to certain GFX cards. Sterescopic Player can handle the stream files for 3DBRs, but because of licensing costs it's not a full featured BR player (i.e. can't handle menus). That, however, is pretty much its only limitation.

Half-SBS should work with a regular media player + HDMI setup... you just tell your TV that it's 3D content and it knows how to convert half-SBS to frame sequential.

Also worth noting that if you can't find the right format, there are conversion programs available.