[Bino-list] Bino with Nvidia Vision 3D on Linux

[Florian Schulte]

Hello,

sorry for being that detailed but i want to share my experiences i
made in the last weeks and i hope this can help others.

I got a NVidia 3D Vision 2 kit for Christmas. First i tried to get it
to work under Windows 7 on my Desktop in combination with my Emachines
V700 DLP-Beamer (Connected via HDMI). This Beamer is identical to the
Acer H5360 except for its 3D Vision certification (but it is capable).
Using a modified H5360 driver with overridden EDID-Data i made the
Nvidia Driver believe this certified device is connected and it
accepted it. Games and Bino worked well on Windows.
The problem is, i want to use it with my HTPC/Server that is running
Ubuntu 12.10 and on linux, 3D Vision is supported with Quadro graphics
cards only. My HTPC is a Dual-Core-Celeron / Nvidia ION System (aka
Geforce 9400). As already proposed in bug report #55117 by somebody
else, i combined bino with libnvstusb. I connected the beamer via VGA
to get 720p120Hz,, HDMI didn’t work somehow. With my changes i managed
to initialize the emitter automatically when the video starts in
sequential mode, i even had a proper 3d effect. The problem was, when
looking through the glasses, the image was violet and a bit too dark.
It seemed that the green part of the image was missing. I verified
this by opening a rgb color wheel (like this
http://www.ballon-1.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/RGB1.gif). Result:
The green circle was not visible or respectively dark brown. I tried
to simulate how the video looked like:
http://imageshack.us/a/img194/6218/marvelq.png .
When i’m looking on the canvas without the glasses, i see all circles
of the rgb image and the video with doubled edges but in terms of
colors normal. So the green color must be projected. I’m assuming that
the glasses are opened in the wrong moment, because the projector is a
DLP Beamer that projects the three primary colors for each image
separately very rapidly one after another. The green part is likely
just drawn too early or too late for the shutter time window. I
experimented with the timings and made some changes to the sources of
bino and libnvstusb, i even captured the usb data of the emitter on
windows to compare it to the data sent by the library, but i couldn’t
get it to work correctly. But this does not mean anything, because my
c skills are a bit limited and i mostly changed some values.
        After that i decided to get a Quadro FX3700 on ebay to try it the
official way. I created an edid.bin for the beamer from the H5360s
windows drivers using Monitor Asset Manager. I included it into the
xorg using the CustomEDID option. Et voila: According to the Xorg logs
the beamer is recognized as the Acer H5360 and 3D Vision is available
and enabled. The emitter is activated when the X Server is started as
well. But the end of the story is that i have got the same effect as i
got with the libnvstusb (violet video).

Any suggestions?

I created a patch for bino to enable 3d vision and hope that there are
some other people having a 3d vision device who will test it. I’m
especially interested in users with capable monitors because all
colors are shown at the same time and should not have the same
problems i have.

Patch File:
http://pastebin.com/VhFQ5zwb
Description:
I used bino-1.4.0 for this patch, newer versions may also work because
the changes are rather small. If you apply it, the emitter is enabled
everytime you play a movie with bino, regardless if you select
alternating frame mode or another mode (this has to be fixed before
integrating it). Also take note that you need a firmware file
nvstusb.fw for the emitter in the working directory. It can be
extracted from the nvidia windows drivers using the supplied tool from
libnvstusb or by simply by googling for it. Last but not least you
need write access to the emitters usb device (using udev rules or
*whisper* by running bino as root).

Kind Regards
Florian Schulte