"Forcing" 3D playback for a passive monitor

[HaPK]

Hi there.

I recently bought a Cinema 3D D2342 LG computer monitor, which happens to have passive 3D technology by interlacing the 2 3D images (more info in this review), and a Blu-ray unit for my PC. Now, since this is passive 3D I don't need any extra special hardware to see 3D, only software.

I bought a 3d movie (blu-ray) to see if I could watch it with my new hardware, but I found out that if I want to see 3D blu-rays I need to buy some really expensive piece of software, and right now I'm not willing to do that.

VLC already displays this 3D blu-ray, somehow, as a side-by-side 3D video. I could cross my eyes, but then the 3D looks wrong, I would be seeing the image for the right eye on my left and vice versa. So I was thinking that maybe I could see it in real 3D if I transformed the frames of the video in real time.

It would be something like this:
* Put both sides of the video in the center
* Apply an alpha mask, or do a similar alpha transformation, for every odd row in the left image, and every even row on the right image (if I got this wrong simply switch the masking)
* Do this in real time for all the frames in the video

I use mostly linux (Ubuntu) but also have windows in this machine, so I was wondering if, first, this is doable somehow (by adding inputs in the command line or something similar), and if this can be added as a plugin. I think it could be easier in linux, but I'd also like lo be able to do this on windows.

I hope you guys can help me with this

[pchilds]

Bit of a late reply, just joined the forum.
You've probably figured this out already but side by side is one of the formats supported by the monitor you have. All you need to do is press the menu button, select 3d settings and chage it to side by side. The monitor will then convert the side by side image to row interlaced. (The other thing is to make sure they boxed the correct galsses otherwise you have to lie on your side to watch in 3d).
I also have a monitor of this family, Ubuntu etc. and have yet to convert blurays into a playable format. Wish I knew how you got vlc displaying it as side by side.
Ideally because it is a row interlaced monitor, I would want to convert the file into either row-interlaced or half top and bottom (half as this will be a smaller file size and the monitor loses vertical resolution anyway). I use makemkv to make the backups so I can play them which can also convert them to mkv but only in framepacked format. If anyone has any tips on how I can do this before I delve into the world of ffmpeg Iwould be greatly appreciated.