IVRPA International Virtual Reality Professionals Association

360 video metadata:

exiftool will read and edit metadata on most video files, including 360° VR video

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

also see this this link for a collection of specifications and tools for 360° video and spatial audio, including: Spatial Audio metadata specification, Spherical Video metadata specification, Spatial Media tools for injecting spatial media metadata in video files

https://github.com/google/spatial-media

the current 360 spherical video metatdata scheme draft is here

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

sample metatdata looks like this –

  true
  true
  
    OpenCV for Windows v2.4.9
  
  equirectangular
  6
  90
  0
  0
  1400454971
  
    1920
  
  
    1080
  
  1900
  960
  15
  60

note the Spatial Media Metadata Injector tool “Examine” command which prints spatial media metadata contained in an existing file

https://github.com/google/spatial-media/tree/master/spatialmedia

360 photo metadata:

https://developers.google.com/streetview/spherical-metadata

Editing 360 Photos & Injecting Metadata

here are a few tutorials on editing google street view photosphere metadata in existing panos using ExifTool –

http://learn360photography.com/blog/how-to-upload-non-android-360-panoramas-to-google-maps/

http://tonyredhead.com/google-tips/exiftool-terminal-mac

http://tonyredhead.com/google-tips/non-android-photospheres-mac-osx

http://tonyredhead.com/google-tips/pyexiftool-exiftool-linking-issue

sam

I too am trying to find out how to simply inject initial heading/pitch/fieldofview metadata into a 360-degree video file. For some reason, the rudimentary software provided with Samsung’s Gear 360 renders the 360 video 2:1 file in reverse – i.e. the default view is for the rear of the image to be displayed first.

For future videos I can just hold the camera the ‘wrong’ way round of course, but I need to correct some existing material before I can properly upload it to YouTube. Facebook allows you to change the initial view settings after uploading, but FB has size and time limitations. YouTube allows for bigger uploads, but you can’t reorient the default initial view.

I’ve tried exiftool (which has been my regular tag editing tool for photos for many years) and while it displays all of the regular video metadata from my 360 MP4 files, it doesn’t display any gspherical tags at all, even after using the Spatial Media Metadata Injector tool. (Verbose mode does note that the tag is present, but it reports that the format is unsupported)

Any thoughts on this issue, as there seem to be a lot of questions on the web about this but no useful answers of a nice little freeware tool to do the job.

Andre

Hi all. New to the IVRPA and to the forums. Thanks for this detail on metadata – it will really help in a project I’m working on.

Does the metadata for 360 video carry any concept of time signature? The reason I ask is, I am looking at ways to combine a clip of standard video and a clip of 360 video.

One option is to inject metadata that identifies the point at which the video switches from standard to 360.

Another option is to inject 360 metadata from the start and then edit the standard video into a spherical format; this would mean the initial standard video would probably present like a cinema screen floating in space but could look ok.