The VideoLAN Forums

Hopefully this is the proper area for this question.

I've downloaded some 360° videos from YouTube and they don't seem to play in the correct format. I did some research and tried the recommendation at this link: https://video.stackexchange.com/questio ... 360-videos using this tool: https://github.com/google/spatial-media ... s/tag/v2.0 but the tool did not present the 360° video correctly. The video was apparently recorded with a Xiaomi Mijia 360 camera. It seems the top half of the video is horizontal panorama and the bottom half is a vertical panorama rotated sideways. YouTube plays the video correctly of course but VLC does not.

This is Youtube's new format, I believe. Not the usual 360.

This is Youtube's new format, I believe. Not the usual 360.

Thank you for the reply. It seems some company always has to do something to make a standard, non-standard. . . . I'm hoping the VLC player will be able to provide an option to choose a "projection type" when it comes to 360° video playback to allow me to correct playback like this. Or hopefully someone can make a batch tool to quickly alter the video without degrading it so that it will playback correctly in VLC.

That might come later, yes.

That might come later, yes.

Thanks! There is hope then. . . I hope it will come soon.

ah, someone with proper info.. :):)
a few years ago, 'pot player' or 'kmplayer' did properly recognize this format and show it properly... then it was 'taken over' and upgraded, and lost any capability.
there is a LOT of mis-information, buggy software promising much, and crashing, just not doing it, etc...

so if you could develop something (an addon or separate plugin??) to display a saved yt 360 vid as in the OP, that would be marvelous.... :):)

Hi, 360 support is already supported. It's mostly an issue with proper tagging of the files so it can be detected as so.
We might add an option to force projection one day, but it's certainly not a good user-experience for the user to have to set the projection type.

Hi, 360 support is already supported. It's mostly an issue with proper tagging of the files so it can be detected as so.
We might add an option to force projection one day, but it's certainly not a good user-experience for the user to have to set the projection type.

I tried playing a YouTube 360° video yesterday but it still played back like the screenshot at the top of my post. How do I go about tagging it so it will detect it as a 360° video?

It depends on the container type.

If you're displaying a picture, it would be in the exif information. In a matroska file it would be in the matroska header.
https://www.matroska.org/technical/specs/index.html (look for ProjectionType)

Editing this can probably be done with mkvmerge or mkvpropedit, but unfortunately I can't help you with the UI if you need one.

In any case, look for a tool matching with the container you want to tag.

It depends on the container type.

If you're displaying a picture, it would be in the exif information. In a matroska file it would be in the matroska header.
https://www.matroska.org/technical/specs/index.html (look for ProjectionType)

Editing this can probably be done with mkvmerge or mkvpropedit, but unfortunately I can't help you with the UI if you need one.

In any case, look for a tool matching with the container you want to tag.

Okay, thanks. I'll look to see if something exists. What I was talking about was a YouTube video I downloaded, several YouTube videos, so it would be a .mp4 file.

With ffmpeg, something like this probably : https://superuser.com/questions/1438821/adding-custom-metadata-tags-to-mp4
I'll try to find a tool for this.

Hi, im creating an iOS Application, where i have to play 360 video using VLCPlayer. I added VLC via pod, and played a 360 video locally. But VLC not being able to pan the video. VLC doesnt treat video as 360 video. Should i make many settings to play 360 video using VLC?

Try downloading the software designed for the camera on which the video was originally taken. Maybe try a few 360-camera-specific softwares if you dont know the camera. There arent too many.

>>With ffmpeg, something like this probably : https://superuser.com/questions/1438821 ... ags-to-mp4
I'll try to find a tool for this.
IMO google spatial-media tool may help.(However didn't try on my own yet)

- Linjie

Update(2 years later...):
Spatial Media Metadata Injector seems to work.
https://github.com/google/spatial-media ... -v2-rfc.md
https://www.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/e ... &context=3

- Linjie