There has been a recent surge in VR video content lately, thanks to ever increasing hype of Metaverse and AI. Personally, I am not much a fan of wearing a VR headset or as I have eye floaters and vision problems due to sinusitis, therefore I try to consume any VR content on the PC using a common and very powerful media player called VLC.
After Fix
VLC desktop and mobile version can virtually play any media content, but it lacks behind when it comes to VR, spherical 360° Videos (stereoscopic 3D, 180, SBS, LR etc.) files. Thankfully there’s an easy fix for that which will take just 2 minutes.
The problem with most VR files:
The VR video files we usually download or play do not contain spatial metadata which basically is information which tells the VLC to make video scrollable or navigable with mouse by holding click and dragging cursor.
The Solution, Injecting VR Spatial Metadeta Manually:
How to Fix and Play Any VR video and play it in VLC with Pan and Zoom Support
- Download Spatial Media Metadata Injector Tool latest version from GitHub. Make sure you save the zip file according to your operating system. Extract the zip file, run the program by double-clicking it.
Link for Windows 10/11: https://github.com/google/spatial-media/releases/download/v2.1/360.Video.Metadata.Tool.win.zip
For MAC OS: https://github.com/google/spatial-media/releases/download/v2.1/360.Video.Metadata.Tool.mac.zip
- Now from Metadata Injector Tool, select your video file (.mp4, .mkv etc). If you have a side-by-side VR video (180, 360 etc.), check the first ‘My Video is Spherical 360‘ option and click Metadata
- The tool will ask you for location to save the Fixed VR video file, provide the destination folder, click Open.
- Then, a duplicate video file will be saved on your PC hard drive with “injected” prefix in file name.
- Play the video file using VLC, and enjoy the VR content. Use mouse wheel to zoom-in and zoom out, or just hold click and drag to pan through the video.
I’ve been searching everywhere for something like. Thank you very much that tool sorts out the issues I’ve had.
Thanks mate ! this is what i looking for the whole time, you’re the best
Thank you so much, I finally found the solution.
Only thing unanswered: In the tool, what does the second option do (video is stereoscopic)? I could not see any difference in the ouput files.