Add metadata to 360° mp4 videos for VLC
VLC 3.0 supports 360° videos. How can I mark up a mp4 file so that VLC recognizes it as 360 degree video?
It's not possible with exiftool. You have to use the spatial media metadata injector from https://github.com/google/spatial-media/tree/master/spatialmedia
My findings:
Spherical Video RFC
https://github.com/google/spatial-media/blob/master/docs/spherical-video-rfc.md
Git commit:
- c3d173385bf0e5ad915328e4b91939c1ae367106
- demux: mp4: support the 360 spherical video box
- http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=commitdiff;h=c3d173385bf0e5ad915328e4b91939c1ae367106;hp=08d26ea02f5c6c1e1169fd9f315a00e88241f03e
VLC only tries to find the string "GSpherical:Spherical" in the meta data to activate the mode.
exiftool:
$ exiftool -XMP-GSpherical:Spherical="true" file.mp4
Unfortunately, exiftool writes this in normal XMP data, but the spec v1 wants it in an atom with uuid ffcc8263-f855-4a93-8814-587a02521fdd. exiftool does not support this.
You can check this with AtomicParsley (apt install atomicparsley):
AtomicParsley file.mp4 -T 1
This special uuid is missing.
The following command will make it look as if the correct metadata is in your video file, but it actually will not work with VLC because of the missing uuid:
$ exiftool -XMP-GSpherical:Spherical="true" -XMP-GSpherical:Stitched="true" -XMP-GSpherical:StitchingSoftware=dummy -XMP-GSpherical:ProjectionType=equirectangular file.mp4
Adding XMP-GPano:ProjectionType=equirectangular does also not help:
$ exiftool -ProjectionType="equirectangular" file.mp4
Spherical Video V2
https://github.com/google/spatial-media/blob/master/docs/spherical-video-v2-rfc.md
git commit in vlc:
- cf8b24f05438d6bc451e0d17bf2bf3d006a5cbe3
- demux: mp4: support 360° v2 spatial metadata
- http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=commitdiff;h=cf8b24f05438d6bc451e0d17bf2bf3d006a5cbe3;hp=1afd117faf50e266998ace5f08f06e52b2260958
v2 of the spec wants special mp4 atoms/boxes that exiftool is not able to write :/
