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.
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 :/
