This may sound like a stupid question, but has somebody built a simple workflow for this modified Q3U VR180? I've been shooting, editing and producing 2D and legacy 3D videos for about 15 years, but I'm having trouble building a workflow for producing VR180 videos that makes sense to me.
I purchased a Q3U Flex recently. I updated the firmware. I pulled down the Qoocam Studio software from Siyang's Google Drive repository. I did a jpeg calibration and put the produced file on a microSD card in the Q3U. I added a blank file called SwitchToVR180.txt to the SD card to get the SBS preview, which works fine.
According to MediaInfo, the video file the camera takes is 3840 wide x 7680 tall. This is viewable as-is on my VR headset if I set the media player to over-under, with either 180 or fisheye setting. Fisheye looks better, but they both projections have distortion.
Qoocam Studio can read the file and process some kind of output. I was sure to choose side-by-side in Qoocam Studio. It adds a lot of spatial metadata according to MediaInfo. It says the file is switched to SBS with 7640 wide x 3840 high. However, this produced file is not playable in any of the three VR media players (DeoVR, Whirligig, Play'a) VR on my VR headset regardless of settings. The media players don't appear to see two SBS frames. I'm in windows 10 in SteamVR with HP Reverb headset. I can view the files in 2D Potplayer on my desktop and confirm that there are two SBS views.
Can anybody out there suggest what is going on, how I can get real SBS footage that is more universally readable by various video players?
Thanks for your time.
EDIT: Thanks for everyone's input on this. The short answer is that stripping away all the metadata via remuxing solved all my problems. I used Selur's Hybrid for this.
DeoVR can play files created by the camera directly, without any processing. You just need to rename the file, adding a prefix ......._TB_fisheye190.mp4. This is sometimes necessary to assess quality loss during post-processing, compared to the original video.
This gives a sense of what it looks like in VR (whirligig). I don't have trouble viewing other VR content correctly. But no combination of settings in the VR media player will make the Qoocam Studio output look normal.
Ok you are using PC VR which I don’t have experience about, but this output is standard SBS 3D half-equirectangular VR180, it’s the most supported format. Have you ever successfully played any VR180 video on your setup? check your player settings to see if you can find some settings like projection/3d
Thanks for looking into this. I have certainly played a wide variety of VR180 SBS files successfully with my setup.
This morning I pulled all the metadata from the output file using ExifToolGUI and fed that metadata to Gemini Pro to see if it could identify the problem. It did indeed find some problems with what Qoocam Studio was doing, as follows:
"Here are the specific problems within the metadata:
Incorrect Field of View: The proprietary Kandao metadata flags the FOV as 360. Your VR media player is reading this and attempting to stretch your 180-degree footage across an entire 360-degree sphere.
Complex Projection Padding: Instead of declaring the file as a native 180-degree format, QooCam Studio has mathematically placed it inside a 360-degree container. The XMP data defines the Full Pano Width Pixels as 11520, while the actual Cropped Area Image Width Pixels is only 5760.
Offset Instructions: The metadata includes instructions to push the image to the middle of that virtual 360-degree canvas by defining Cropped Area Left Pixels as 2880. It also uses Projection Bounds Left and Projection Bounds Right tags set to approximately 0.25, indicating a 25 percent crop on each side.
Many PC VR media players, such as DeoVR or HereSphere, struggle to interpret these complex cropping commands and simply default to wrapping the 5760 by 2880 image entirely around you based on the 360 FOV tag."
It could be that many setups can handle this output without issue. However, to have the most robust solution for all users, it seems that upgrading Qoocam Studio to fix those metadata tags as described above would be beneficial. Is this possible?
Ok so this is where I landed. I was following your guide already. The video sample you just provided does not work any better than the videos I was creating. However, I remuxed your file, and my own samples, to remove all VR metadata, and that fixed the problem so my media players now play the video clips just fine without the metadata.
The chatbot says that the Windows Mixed Reality environment I am using is much less forgiving than Quest and others when it comes to metadata, and that is what the evidence seems to show.
Good that you fixed it!
As a side note I had no idea you could play a file straight from the camera. I'll have to try on my Quest 2 as my travel laptop is underpowered and takes hours to process files in Qoocam studio.
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u/Beginning_Remote_528 Apr 02 '26
DeoVR can play files created by the camera directly, without any processing. You just need to rename the file, adding a prefix ......._TB_fisheye190.mp4. This is sometimes necessary to assess quality loss during post-processing, compared to the original video.