Every few months I go on a quest to find a solution to watching my 3d Disks on a 4K TV. It always ends in frustration because the search words always pick outdated and wrong information. I know there must be a solution out there.

I want to be able to watch 3D on a non-3D 4K tv using active glasses. I have Samsung 1st gen active glasses, Xpand universal glasses, and DLP compatible glasses. Preferred source is Blu Ray disks in a player.

The pipe dream is to have a box with an HDMI input from the 3D blu ray player which also contains an emitter for the glasses. The picture is minimally processed and outputted to the display. Upscale is totally not necessary. It should be easy, the TV can handle the double frame rate fine, especially if it is at HD resolutions instead of 4K.

What am I missing? Is there hardware out there that does that. Search yields so much crap, I can't seem to find it.

The last resort would be to use an old PC with an emitter, but again, the info out there is so outdated and so is much of the hardware. Or it's severely overpriced because it's "vintage" equipment. And getting to work well in a PC solution is not as easy as it should be.

I have a DLP projector and it's fine, but it only usable in a spare room where I can control light and can pull down a screen. I want a living room solution that everyone can enjoy. Any ideas to get me through all the crap online is greatly appreciated.

Pretty sure it is (as close to) impossible (as it gets) to watch a 3D movie on a non-3D display. Sure, you could have an emitter connect to the glasses, but without the display supporting it, you aren't going to see 3D. If it was possible, people would not care as much that they don't make 3D TVs anymore.



Best option is to find a used 4K 3D tv (or see if any Z9Ds are in stock near you) or to buy a 4k 3D projector that works well with ambient light.

But a display doesn't know what 3D is. It's no different than a 2D signal. The content is just sequential frames. I understand that there could be latency issues with the emitter which needs to be solved by making the timing adjustable (i think DPL uses an inserted red flash which solves that problem) and the potential for strobing from the backlight. But it's just video at double the frame rate, which is in the supported range of my 4K TV.

are you kidding?

I stand corrected. Look for 3D Now, 3D Theatre Plus, those seem to be the only non-anaglyph converter boxes. Wonder why they never made more variations of them.



http://www.curtpalme.com/3DTheatrePlus.shtm


This is what I was able to find so far. No idea if you'll be able to find any.


https://www.avsforum.com/forum/194-3...w-theater.html
https://www.avsforum.com/forum/194-3...ater-plus.html

Thanks for looking. Yes I know Curt from about 20 years ago. I have a whole garage full of Electrohome projectors and parts I would send to him if shipping wasn't astronomical. He has good stuff, but the prices are just out of this world. I would spend a reasonable amount of money, but those are not in the cards. I would be better off tracking down an overpriced OLED from 2016.

There as so many cheap signal processors these days coming out of China, it's so hard to believe someone hasn't created a box. If I knew a circuit designer, I'd make one up myself and sell it, because there must be a market. If not just in the US, but worldwide.

There is also Edison 3D:

https://xu-yun.com/

However, none of these active converters work very well due to flickering issues.

Back in the CRT days, it was possible to do pretty much what the OP described (watch active shutter 3-D on ordinary TV sets). Field sequential 3-D boxes and compatible glasses were (and still are) available for use with properly encoded VHS tapes and DVDs. There were some legit releases, but most of the material circulated among collectors. I still have a bunch of this material, and a 19" CRT in a spare bedroom to view it.

While it was the best available option at the time, the biggest drawback was noticeable flicker because the CRTs could not refresh fast enough to avoid that. However, there were options to view this material on a PC and head mounted displays, which did not suffer from this problem. The resolution was reduced as well. Using Stereoscopic Player software, I am able to watch this material on my aging Acer 3-D laptop with passive glasses, with no flicker.

I have seen some offers and Kickstarter type campains for similar active shutter device(s) intended to be used with Blu-ray 3D on a standard HD set, but from the sound of it, there are still flicker issues.

It would seem that some 3rd party would try to perfect this - they'd have a captive market.

I also have a 3-D Wizard, which is a similar device, except that it converts Blu-ray 3D to anaglyph for viewing on standard sets. Amazon had them for less than $20.00 for a while, and I picked one up to test it. It did what they advertised.

I remember using a CRT at 75+ Hz with NVIDIA's early Shutter Glasses (original GeForce days, probably 1998-1999?). Seemed OK to me at the time with some flickering noticeable from memory.

I'm thinking with the new HDMI 2.1 specification with proper 120 Hz+ TV's this would potentially enable retrofitting the Active 3D technology assuming the TV is accepting a true 120 Hz+ input - just have to see how the current 2019/2020+ models will support HDMI 2.1.

That's not really true. The display does know it's 3D, it has to for 3D to accept the signal and to be displayed properly. The signal is different from 2D, so much so they had to release a new mandatory spec for HDMI to support it. (specifically HDMI 1.4 and finally HDMI 1.4(a) for framepacking.

If the display or any hardware in between isn't HDMI 1.4a it will not detect that it's a 3D display and the content will only display in 2D.

Yes, Edison 3D came up here before. https://www.avsforum.com/forum/192-3...y-tv-3dtv.html

Keep in mine you're display is 60hz so you're only getting half that to each eye/second the result would be a darker image and flickering. Just get something that's 3D ready and save yourself a headache.

For the latest version of active 3D in tvs that use Bluetooth to sync with the glasses, the vsync frequency needs to be measured and that is used to send the information to the 3D glasses. An external box will not have access to the vsync signal so it is not going to work as well as a TV with 3d built in. If the vsync signal was completely stable then an external box could work well but unfortunately the vsync signal isn't.

Here is a dated overview on converting regular TVs into 3D and what to look out for: https://www.ebay.com/gds/What-Produc...5102345/g.html

I've tried several in the past, and they all had flickering and dark picture issues, just not watchable even if your TV is 120HZ. If the flickering doesn't get you, the dark picture probably will.

It seems like a box could self-calibrate to any TV by sending the TV a video signal containing alternating white and black frames, then use an optical input sensor to detect the TV's output timing/sync/latency, and then adjust its IR output for the glasses to match.

Over many hours of watching, the sync could get off--perhaps the TV's clock might be faster or slower than the box's clock. In that case there could be a manually configurable adjustment to speed up or slow down the box's clock, in order to dial in that last little bit.

But I am not an electrical engineer so I have no idea what I'm talking about. It is all just layman speculation.

The problem is the optical sensor could not measure the vsync accurately enough and would have to be constantly recalibrated. I guess you could calibrate as best you can but it would never be as good as the actual 3d tv measuring the vsync directly and constantly.

+1


+1

Does that mean that a bright 120hz panel would be 'okay' at using these devices?

You would have to make sure it handles 120hz creating 60hz per eye, but even though you have a bright panel, the brightness gets reduced quite a bit and some panels solar out when you turn up the brightness and contrast, giving an eerie looking image, especially with faces and skin. Like anything in life that is not mainstream: "you pays your money and you takes your chances."