I am wondering what capabilities ELAN has for ‘spherical / 360 video’ if any.
I see this note in the manual: “Spherical or 360-degree video (in .mp4) is
supported only on Linux and Windows.”
I am unsure of exactly what this means, though. When I put my own 360 video file (recorded on an insta 360) and rename the extension to .mp4 it appears in ELAN in the dual fisheye format. Is that right?
Is ELAN planning to try to support 360 video more rigorously in the future?
Thanks in advance for any response, and for all that you do, generally!
Hi,
At the moment the level of support for that type of video completely depends on what the VLC player has to offer. When this first was introduced, navigation worked reasonably on Linux, a bit less on Windows (with VLC) and not at all on macOS. I don’t know what the situation is with the latest version of VLC player (and the Java wrapper around the VLC player).
In ELAN you can select the “preferred” media player in the Preferences->Platform/OS panel, so you could give it a try by switching to VLC as the preferred player and see what works (if anything). You could also try your 360 video file with its original extension.
Yes it would be nice to have better support for this kind of videos. From the top of my head, back then (two years ago) making use of “native” Windows support for 360-degree video would require us to support (again) a newer Windows media framework (a lot of work!). I believe on macOS at that time it seemed the AV Foundation didn’t support that kind of video at all (I may be wrong of what exactly the issue was).
So, offering better support is kind of complicated.
What operating system are you working on?
-Han
