Disclaimer: I make no claim as to the legality or otherwise of this method of watching these DVDs. DECSS is not used at any point.
Slingshot Entertainment recently released several 3D DVDs, mastered from 3D IMAX films. These are intended to be watched on a television with a kit, but with a little effort can be viewed on your PC using 3DCombine.
First of all the following software is required:
The 3D films on the DVDs are not encrypted so DECSS is not required and the VOB files can be read directly from the DVD. You require only enough space on your hard disk to store the re-encoded film.
1) Run DVD2AVI and open the first VOB file from the 3D film. If you are not sure which this is you will have to experiment. It will be on the DVD drive as DVD:\video\vts_0?_1.vob, where the question mark should be replaced with a number, generally 1 or 2. Note that you will have to authenticate the drive by running a DVD player first.
2) Check that the audio is being processed and save the project file.
3) Install the VFAPI codec and then use the VFAPI Reader to convert the .d2v project file you just created to an AVI file.
4) Use 3DCombine to convert the AVI file from interlaced format into side-by-side or above-and-below format. I also recommend resizing the video to 320x240 using the filters option. If the DVD is encoded with a simple non-blurring telecine (e.g. Ultimate G's) select the inverse telecine option. To obtain the correct value for the offset you will have to watch the de-interlaced images and ensure that both images update every frame. I recommend using the DivX 5 codec to compress the output from 3DCombine.
5) Use the 3DCombine video player to playback the AVI file you just created. You can also select the audio file (WAV) that was created in step two to get sound. The sound and video will be synced automatically.
6) You may wish to burn the AVI onto CD for storage. Please note that because the audio and video are not interleaved, you should copy the audio file back to the hard disk before watching the film. You may also wish to recompress the audio, please beware that some MP3 codecs don't properly report their position at 48 KHz, so you should convert to 44 KHz before encoding or the audio/video will be out of sync.
