Is there any way to tell if a video is 360 or panorama?

Question

for a project I am working on I will need to automatically decide if a video is a VR (360) video, and if so what format it is. Is there any way to tell? I was thinking the metadata but could not find any information on this.

Answer 1

Checking size is pointless, most properly encoded movies are using standard sizes like 1080p (1920x1080), WQHD (2560×1440) or 4K (3840×2160) because of better hardware decoding. To do that they don't have square pixels. Therefore you shouldn't guess anything by ratio.

What you should do, is check the presence of zenith and nadir. That is check for the topmost and bottommost region of image if it is the same color (assuming the most standard equirectangular projection).

This approach will need some adjusting if you have stereoscopy involved. You would have to repeat this procedure for each eye region. As a bonus, you can also deduce some stereoscopy types - for example you could differentiate top-bottom, mono and left-right. Unfortunately you couldn't guess which image is for which eye, so you would have to assume the more common situation where the left eye is usually the top or left one in the image.

Answer 2

There is an RFC for Metadata to describe spherical data in MP4 videos:

• https://github.com/google/spatial-media/blob/master/docs/spherical-video-v2-rfc.md

This includes the introduction of a new spherical video header box, svhd, which you can test for the presence of to detect if a video is a VR 360 video.

This is not ubiquitous yet but it does have support from key players like Google, and as you have discovered, something like this is necessary so it seems likely its use will spread.