Recently, I was struggling a bit with our new Philips TV. It can do 3D and it can play *.avi and *.mkv movies but it seemed not to be able to play these in 3D even though they had the 3D information encoded (side by side).
After some fiddling, I found out: it works perfectly. The only thing that’s blocking the 3D feature is that the samples I tried were not in HD. Apparently the TV requires the source file to have a 1920×1080 resolution. Once you got the file in the right format, it works like a charm and you can enable the 3D feature via the on-screen menu.
Here is a quick command to re-encode a clip in the right resolution and in a format that the TV can definitely read:
$> mencoder 3d-sample-in.avi -vf scale=1920:1080 -o 3d-sampe-out.avi \\ -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts vbitrate=2200
Mencoder is part of the mplayer software package. I have not optimized the above line for performance or size… using different encoder options may result in a much better result.
