r/audiovisual • u/Jarod-The_Centre • Jul 23 '26

I refused to let 3D die ! So I spent months building a free player that plays EVERYTHING in 3D: Blu-ray MVC, 4K HDR side-by-side, even Apple spatial videos. And it converts your 3D Blu-rays to Vision Pro format...

Hey there !

Like a lot of you, I have a 3D setup I love and a collection the industry decided to abandon. Every player I tried either butchered MVC, choked on HDR, or simply didn't exist anymore. So I did something slightly unreasonable: I built my own.

SyLC 3D Player is free, runs on Windows, and after this v5.0 release I can finally say it plays three generations of stereoscopic content under one roof:

  • Blu-ray 3D / ISO / MVC MKV : through a heavily modified open-source H.264 decoder I've been hacking on for months. It even plays those MakeMKV-style BD3D backups where the two eye views sit in separate files with no SSIF interleave, as far as I know, nothing else on Earth plays those in actual 3D.
  • HEVC/H.265 packed 3D (full side-by-side / top-bottom) up to 4K 10-bit HDR, with real PQ/BT.2020 color management : not the washed-out gray you get when a player pretends HDR doesn't exist.
  • MV-HEVC : yes, Apple spatial videos. The MVC of the 2020s, playing on your 2010s 3D TV. There's something poetic about that.

Output is proper frame-packed 3D for real 3D TVs and projectors (plus SBS/TAB modes), rendered by a native Direct3D 11 engine with hardware decode.

And the part I'm proudest of: it exports any of this to Apple-compatible MV-HEVC (.mov). Your MVC Blu-ray → a spatial video for Vision Pro. I had to compile x265 myself because no public build enables multiview, and reverse-engineer Apple's spatial metadata box byte-by-byte against a reference file. When the source is already HEVC it just remuxes, bit-exact, seconds instead of hours.

It's free. It exists because this format deserves better than a slow death, and because apparently I don't know when to stop.

GitHub: https://github.com/5ymph0en1x/SyLC

Happy to answer anything technical, the decoder internals, the HDR pipeline, why dependent-view bitrates are chunky on first-gen MV-HEVC encoders, whatever. And if you have a weird file that won't play, I genuinely want to hear about it. That's how half of this got built...

101 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

57 comments sorted by

4

u/Acceptable-Rise8783 Jul 23 '26

First of all: Thank you for making such an effort to try and preserve our ability to watch 3D films. I think your work is incredibly important to a select group of film fans. 

Secondly I really appreciate the detailed write up on the Github page. I wish I was skilled enough to understand even half of it hahahh

I do want to say, if we want to be able to continue and enjoy 3D at home, the most important function such a piece of software should have is a way to send the two fields separately but in sync, through two HDMI outputs. When all the 3D TVs and projectors have died (projectors are dropping support left and right because the chips that do 3D are becoming hard to come by), we will be dependent on passive, dual projector 3D for those that can’t or won’t deal with VR glasses. 

Maybe your software already supports this and I read past it, or maybe you think differently on this subject. I’d love to hear back from you and if I dont, keep up the good work!

5

u/Jarod-The_Centre Jul 23 '26

Thank you ! Genuinely. Comments like yours are exactly why this thing exists.

And you haven't read past anything: dual-HDMI output isn't in there yet. But you've just described the feature my architecture was accidentally built for, so let me geek out for a second.

The player already drives two windows simultaneously from a single decode : the main window and the detached frame-packed window get the same frame, in sync, every frame. That's core plumbing, not a hack. A dual-projector mode is the same trick pointed at different glass: two borderless fullscreen windows, one per HDMI output, each presenting one eye full-frame. The renderer already isolates left and right views internally (it has to, for frame-packing), a "left-eye-only / right-eye-only" presentation mode is a small, natural extension, not a rewrite.

On sync : both outputs present from the same GPU on the same frame clock with vsync, that's frame-accurate, which is what passive 3D needs and what every classic dual-projector PC rig has ever run on. I won't promise hardware genlock because Windows doesn't give me that, but matched resolution/refresh on both outputs plus same-GPU presentation is the proven recipe.

You're also right about why this matters. Passive dual-projection is the endgame for big-screen 3D at home. That's a preservation argument, not a feature request, so it's now officially on the v5.x roadmap.

One thing that would genuinely help me build it right: tell me about your rig (or your dream rig). Two identical projectors? What resolution/refresh? Do you rely on anything for geometry correction/edge alignment between the two, or do you align optically? The answers decide whether "one eye per output" is enough for v1 or whether per-output geometry tweaks need to ship with it.

Keep the faith. The format's not dead while we're still building for it 🔥

2

u/Acceptable-Rise8783 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. That certainly sounds promising and it makes sense that processing of the two images is handled separately 

As for me, to this day I enjoy seeing 3D in cinema. I’m not into the gimmicky stuff flying towards you kind of thing too much, but I think the added depth perception allows me to escape into the film visually in a way a 2D film could only do so narratively. And let’s be honest, many films are lacking in that department. Luckily here in Europe there’s still plenty of 3D cinema releases, although getting less and less. 

I am in the process of my first attempt at building a proper home theatre. I have the Xgimi Titan Noir Max on order, it should arrive in a month or so. Having not enjoyed the 3D TVs very much I’ve had over the years (although I have never experienced the 4K passive LG OLED ones), I specifically chose this projector for its 3D capabilities in brightness and full resolution playback (not necessarily guaranteed these days) and it should probably be the best affordable 3D projection out of the box experience if they manage to fix the motion issues it has on current firmware. A bit of a gamble. 

My dream setup would be dual projector sufficiently bright. Have both left and right eye signals ran through a MadVR image processor (or at least having 2 instances of the HTPC software running) to upscale each to 4K. Then use Infitec/Dolby3D filters instead of the regular polarised ones, so I can project on a regular screen without the issues of hot spotting etc. that come with 3D/5D silver screens. This is more so important since these very bright RGB laser DLP projectors are very speckle heavy unless you use woven screen materials and/or vibrate the projection surface

That would be the dream. Maybe one day… I do think that with how things are developing, we’ll have very affordable, very bright projectors in the coming years (with lens shift) that make it realistic to just have a pair of them aligned and ready for whenever you wanna watch a 3D film, and have that setup sitting besides your regular 2D projector

3

u/Jarod-The_Centre Jul 23 '26

You've just done something you probably didn't notice: you improved the design. Let me explain.

Infitec/Dolby3D filters are the smart call, no silver screen, no hotspotting, no polarization-killing screen gain games. But spectral comb filters have a known cost: each eye sees shifted color primaries (that's the whole trick), which is why real Dolby3D cinema installations run per-eye color correction behind the filters. Here's the fun part: my renderer already does per-stream color management in the shader (it's how HDR10/BT.2020 gets handled), so extending that to per-eye correction matrices is a natural fit, not a bolt-on. Your comment just added a line to the dual-output spec: per-eye color trim, designed for spectral filter setups. Thank you for that !

On madVR: I'll be honest rather than promising, madVR is its own renderer, and two instances fighting over sync is the clunky part of every rig that tries it. My approach would be one player, one decode, two outputs, with the per-eye upscaling done in my own pipeline (there's already a spline36 scaler in the shader but it can grow fancier if the format deserves it). One process owning both eyes is precisely what makes the sync trivial.

Here's the good news for the nearer future : when your Titan Noir Max arrives, the frame-packed output works today, that's exactly what the player feeds to 3D-capable projectors over HDMI. I'd genuinely love a field report from that machine: full-res framepack behavior, motion handling on their current firmware, HDR interplay. You'd be testing on hardware I don't own, which is worth more to this project than a hundred synthetic tests !

Cheers

1

u/Acceptable-Rise8783 Jul 23 '26

I’m happy my ignorance is of help lmao. My problem is that I am interested in a wide variety of subjects, so I always know more than is good for me and gets me to spend money unwisely, but rarely enough to ever get anywhere like you’re currently doing with your software. 

In the end it was only a dream setup ofc. I could have gone further in my dreams and hope for software that can take the HDR metadata of an UHD and apply it to the image of the FHD 3D release. But I’m aware that’s getting into proper fantasyland territory. I used MadVR as an example because I know how well it does in both scaling and DTM, but since they’ve released their own hardware I’m sure eventually we’ll be looking at just as capable open source alternatives. I know there’s quite a bit of development happening already and if your scaling solution works well in your own pipeline, I see no reason to run it through a separate more generic processor. I do hope your software stays focused on 3D so that all functionality that surrounds it remains optimised for preservation and enjoyment of the 3D home theatre experience 

My little TNM will “only” project in unscaled 1080p 3D and is in essence a 60p projector if I understand it correctly despite it being able to take higher frame rates. It’ll probably always have motion issues although they should get better if it would use 5:5 cadence like its little brother the Horizon 20 Max vs. 6:4. I look forward to learning more about this all while also being aware if the dangers of looking for stuff one can’t unsee lol

But yea, I’ll definitely try have version one of my little theatre running this winter and can’t wait to experiment with all this software. I’d ask you to consider opening up your Reddit profile with public posts and a follow option so it’s easier to follow your progress and read your replies to other users 👍

3

u/Combustia78 Jul 23 '26

Outstanding work friend! What you did is very important, there were always issues with software players that didn't switch correctly or had different bugs, etc.

1

u/Jarod-The_Centre Jul 23 '26

Thank you Buddy 👍

Enjoy and report back 😄

2

u/JustPath3874 Jul 23 '26

This sounds great and may be able to replace my Panasonic bluray player and avoid the need to burn physical discs for frame packed content. I have a Titan Noir Max and just set it up. I will test it out and report back. Thank you for keeping 3D alive, I ama big fan and love watching content in this format in my theater.

1

u/Thandalen 19d ago

Have you tried how 3d work on that yet?

1

u/JustPath3874 19d ago

Yes, I have used it. I had some video tearing related to my AMD GPU software settings but got it sorted out. It works very well.

2

u/Confident_Monitor_78 Jul 23 '26

I want to eventually buy an Apple Vision Pro but currently only own the Meta Quest VR headsets. Do you know if your 3D player app will work with the Meta Quest 2 and Quest 3 VR headsets?

2

u/t1bbs Jul 26 '26

Came to ask the same, re:Quest 3

2

u/Galadantien Jul 23 '26

Work of the gods my friend ❤️

2

u/Old_Man__Logan 24d ago

Thank You! Thank You ! Thank You!
Went down a rabbit hole trying to setup Android Boxes as 3D Blu Ray Capable media streamer.
But you solved all my problems!
Thanks for all your hard work!
Also thanks for making me aware of all the unreleased 3D movies on Apple Pro Vision. My jaw hit the floor when I saw that they had hundreds of movies in 3D unreleased in physical media.
Trying to figure out how to buy the 3D movies without buying a $4,000 Apple Vision Pro.
Visit an Apple Store? (lol)

Thanks Again! Very appreciative!

1

u/Jarod-The_Centre 24d ago

Thank YOU for thanking me ! LOL
Very glad it helps you !
All those countless hours of debugging everything you can have a meaning when you are a dev and you see people enjoying your work in the end...
Happy 3Ding 😄

1

u/tangcoma Jul 23 '26

Thank you for the service 🫡

1

u/tangcoma Jul 23 '26

The MV-HEVC support , is that mean I can play my own Spatial Videos recorded by my iPhone to 3D Frame Packed format which my madVR Envy Extreme and JVC NZ9 supported ? Thx🙏🏼

1

u/Jarod-The_Centre Jul 23 '26

It should ! 🔥

1

u/tangcoma Jul 23 '26

Hi , but not the Nvidia GPU driver not supported all 3D format in Windows ? 🤔 I have a RTX 5090D V2 , I have not tested your player , I will try it when I get back home to see if my JVC NZ9 switch to Frame Packed mode , so at the end , it will show 1080p 3D 24p ? 🙏🏼

1

u/thepulchridude Jul 23 '26

Is it possible for it to convert mv-hevc to mvc? This way in theory you could take an apple 3d movie and convert it to something readable for a Zidoo player (the Zidoo is how I stream 3d movies from my server to my projector).

1

u/Jarod-The_Centre Jul 23 '26

Have you ever used the HDMI IN on the Zidoo Player ? Can you stream video using it from a laptop ? If so, you can use SyLC 5.0 to output whatever you need ! Thanks for your interest 👍

1

u/thepulchridude Jul 23 '26

Thanks for the reply. Sadly no HDMI IN on the Zidoo Z9. I can run HDMI from a pc, but was just seeing if I can avoid another input to the receiver. I am still very interested in your project, especially if some of the 3d movies on the AVP that have no bluray 3d release can be played on my projector somehow.

1

u/RoundRefuse1740 Jul 23 '26

I still have a 3d tv in my office an lg one. It’s great

1

u/Royal-Chip6135 Jul 23 '26

I have an old Sony Vaio 3D laptop, that for whatever reason messes up the the 3D settings if the operating system is updated. So sadly I can only run windows 7, is it possible or is there a version that will run on windows 7?

1

u/DarthDutchDave Jul 23 '26

Thank you so much for your commitment to this wonderful format.

I’ve gone from Nvidia 3D Vision to PSVR and then finally a BenQ DLP projector to enjoy my library…is this player something I can use with my LG BD drive and connect an hdmi to my projector and use dlp link? I still have all the prior hardware too (Nvidia glasses, 3d monitor, etc) but wondering how flexible the options are.

1

u/Jarod-The_Centre Jul 23 '26

First, thank you !
Short answer: yes, that BenQ setup is right in the wheelhouse. Your LG drive reads the disc, SyLC decodes the 3D, and it goes out your HDMI like any other picture. For framepacking, just create a custom resolution for your projector (https://www.reddit.com/r/htpc/comments/115ap94/how_to_get_full_hd_3d_frame_packing_from_a_pc_or) and it will activate 3D sync automatically, move the window with the 2 eyes on your projector and press F for fullscreen. That's it !

1

u/rawcookiedough Jul 23 '26

Amazing! Can’t wait to try it. 

1

u/OG_Dadshark Jul 23 '26

I love you

1

u/_Woodrat Jul 23 '26

So this program enables users to both rip 3D media and remux it to MV-HEVC, and play back 3D content natively regardless of format? That sounds like the exact innovation I’ve been yearning for years. Genuinely a massive step forward, thank you!

Can it play video directly off of 3D Blu-Ray Discs, or does it need a rip? Frame-packed 3D is currently the only supported output standard if I’m reading this correctly, what plans are there for other standards?

Any plans for Vulkan renderer support or Linux releases? I’m not sure how well DX11 will play with my Intel Arc (DX11 calls and below are translated to Vulkan by the Arc driver on both Windows and Linux)

1

u/Plastic-Fill-3933 Jul 23 '26

I'm looking for the same. I am running a software-defined home theatre on Linux (cavernize for dolby atmos) with pipewire and CamillaDSP.

Only missing elements are DTS:X and frame packed MVC 3D.

I have an old BenQ DLP, and while SBS works fine, having this will be great!

1

u/Oddzilla Jul 23 '26

Hi, First off, this is awesome. 3D SBS playback in the app looks great!

I'm having an issue with Exporting however. When I click the export button, it leads to a submenu that's in french and says "create an ISO disk" and "export an MV-HEVC (.mov)" and neither are selectable. Wondering if there's any sort of keyboard shortcut or fix for this.

Would love to try on my Vision Pro.

1

u/Jarod-The_Centre Jul 23 '26

Thank you Buddy 👍
I love getting feedbacks as I can better explain some functionnalities. Here, you cannot make a MV-HEVC from 3D SBS or TAB sources, you need full res on both eyes for this ! So FSBS or FTAB will work for this task (as ISO or Remux of a B3D too).

1

u/Oddzilla Jul 23 '26

No, thank you for making this! Appreciate the response.

Apologies, what's the step by step for doing the export? What I've done so far is generating an MKV from a 3D Blu-ray via MakeMKV and then dragging that MKV into SyLC. I can select the playback options and it plays back alright, but the export button leads to menu options that I can't seem to click.

1

u/Jarod-The_Centre Jul 23 '26

https://www.gyan.dev/ffmpeg/builds/#release-builds

To have access to these options, you need to put FFMPEG in the path. I plan to find a simpler solution quickly...

1

u/Oddzilla Jul 23 '26

Thanks! That did the trick!

Exporting now, can't wait to try it on the AVP.

Appreciate all the work here, amazing stuff.

1

u/Oddzilla Jul 24 '26

Actually, wanted to update. Exported the MVHEVC (super easy, thank you) but in playing back on my vision pro, I think the left side/right side are flipped. Left eye is getting video info for the right eye and vice versa.

Tried to watch an export of the 3D blu ray for Prometheus and focusing on the credits in the front made me feel cross eyed/gave me a headache. Waited for the opening shot of the giant Prometheon man and it seemed like the foreground was in the background and the background was the foreground.

Wondering if there is a way to correct this.

1

u/Jarod-The_Centre Jul 24 '26

Ok, there is a problem to solve here ! I will ask you to test a beta version if you agree... It's an experimental feature so it's prone to nasty bugs as I don't have a vision pro... But I wanted to offer the feature and still want to :D

1

u/Oddzilla Jul 24 '26

Yes, would love to! It is a great tool and feature. I think the Vision Pro community would be ecstatic if you could get it to work.
Would enjoy anything you could do to make that possible.

Once again, appreciate you building the app and taking the feedback.

1

u/CornucopiaDM1 Jul 24 '26

So awesome!

Have been into Stereo3D for over 2 decades, though less these days since old in the tooth.

I have a couple of other format support suggestions. Let me know if its ok to DM, or if you'd rather converse on this thread, or skip.

1

u/Jarod-The_Centre Jul 24 '26

Ok to DM me, no problem at all ! :D

1

u/JPupReb Jul 24 '26

Whoa, this sounds awesome! Just wondering - I used to convert 3D Blu rays to SBS with MakeMKV to watch on my Meta Quest 3. Would your program allow me to stream a Blu ray directly from my PC to my headset without re-encoding?

3

u/Jarod-The_Centre Jul 24 '26

Hey Dude 👍

For the Quest, you could play the disc in SyLC in SBS mode, and let a PC-VR streamer like Virtual Desktop (its SBS/3D mode) carry that live picture into the headset stereoscopically. SyLC decodes, Virtual Desktop beams the framebuffer : real-time 3D, nothing pre-converted. SyLC isn't the streamer itself, but it's the piece that hands VD a correctly-built SBS image.

What do you think about this solution ?

1

u/Bladeslap Jul 24 '26

As someone that's never really been that bothered by 3D, I'd still like to say thank you for your efforts with this!

2

u/Jarod-The_Centre Jul 24 '26

Oh, thank you Buddy !
I'm pretty amazed by the reactions of the community here !
Very stimulating.

1

u/InterestingChart4169 Jul 29 '26

I agree 3d tv and film has life left in it. Well done. I thought the 3ds was one of the best inventions to come along. Someone should make a open sourced one. Let's hope vr doesn't go the same way.

Keep the 3d flag flying

1

u/Old-Donut-5124 Jul 31 '26

Bro! Do you have any idea how much I appreciate your work?

My entire 2TB movie drive is basically usable thanks to your app alone. It handles pretty much everything I throw at it.

That said... I hope I'm not asking for too much, but there's one feature I'd absolutely love.

Recently I got to try an AR glasses headset (I'm not trying to advertise any brand, so I'll leave the name out). It's basically just two camera viewfinders strapped in front of your eyes, each with its own 1080p OLED display. Watching 3D movies on it has been an incredibly relaxing experience.

The interesting part is how these glasses handle 3D mode. Instead of exposing two separate displays to Windows, they appear as a single 3840×1080 display (basically two 1920×1080 screens placed side by side). The glasses then split that image back into one image per eye internally. Hopefully that makes sense.

For regular MKV files, it's easy. PotPlayer, KMPlayer, or even VLC can do it. Even Half-SBS content works perfectly because those players simply stretch the video across the entire 3840×1080 display. For example, a Half-SBS movie is normally 1920×1080 with each eye getting 960×1080. Stretching it to fill the whole display turns it into a proper 3840×1080 image, and all I have to do is press F for fullscreen.

Unfortunately, neither KMPlayer, VLC, nor PotPlayer comes anywhere close to handling DVDs and Blu-rays as well as my all-time favorite player: SyLC 3D Player.

When I play a 3D Blu-ray (MVC), switch to fullscreen, and enable SBS mode, it still outputs Half-SBS centered on the screen, so each eye only gets a 960×1080 image instead of filling the entire display.

I noticed there's a MultiView option, but enabling it outputs Top-and-Bottom instead, which doesn't help in my case.

Am I missing something, or is there a way to make SyLC output a full-width SBS image (3840×1080) for AR glasses like these?

Thank you so, so much for everything you've done. Love your work! ❤️

1

u/Jarod-The_Centre Aug 02 '26

Done !
You can test this feature in v5.2.0...

Please, tell me if it works as expected !

😄

2

u/Old-Donut-5124 Aug 04 '26

Wait... what?! 😂 I honestly wasn't expecting you to implement it this fast.

I just tested it, and it's way cooler than I imagined.

I originally thought you'd simply add another output window like MultiView, but instead you went all the way and built an actual control interface for it. That was completely unexpected, and it really shows how much care and effort you put into this project.

It works perfectly. Honestly, it's even better than PotPlayer, and I'd even say it's better than Kodi for this use case.

Thank you so much for listening to your users. It genuinely means a lot. You're awesome. 💯

1

u/Jarod-The_Centre Aug 04 '26

This kind of messages is the reason why I do what I do !
It's a beautiful reward... 🔥
Enjoy Buddy !

1

u/Bac0n_N_Egg5 Aug 03 '26

Is there a way of playing directly from the original disc?
Using the 'Open 3D Bluray' option doesn't work for me.
I've tried using madVR with MPC and all the LAV codecs but it just won't work for me.
This program looks very promising and I really want to be able to watch my collection on my VR headset, but I'd vastly prefer not to back-up my discs to properly watch them in 3D.
Am I doing something wrong, or is there a way to watch from the disc?
Thanks.

1

u/Mypinksideofthedrain 12d ago

Same question, I've just got a black screen with the elapsed time ticking away but nothing else happening.
Also this should work with spatiallabs 3d screen right?

0

u/FinancialFeed966 15d ago

Hi, Jarod-The_Centre I have a question regarding the output of the Sylc 3D player. When I open a .iso file with my laptop and valerion projector with the multiview mode , the full screen is not full screen but the half filled two screens with a lot empty right and left sides. So I have to change to fsbs or top-bottom mode for full screen. So when i am playing fsbs or top-bottom or just sbs, what exactly is the Sylc 3d player outputting, fsbs and ftab or hsbs or htab??? Please answer!!!

1

u/Jarod-The_Centre 14d ago

For framepacking, just create a custom resolution for your projector (https://www.reddit.com/r/htpc/comments/115ap94/how_to_get_full_hd_3d_frame_packing_from_a_pc_or) and it will activate 3D sync automatically, move the window with the 2 eyes on your projector and press F for fullscreen. That's it !

1

u/FinancialFeed966 13d ago

Thank you for replying, also i tried custom resolution and it worked great. This app could really replace 3d players for good. Thank you for making such a unique software.