It appears that some time over the weekend, YouTube began experimenting with 3D videos. I spotted a thread at the YouTube Help forum about this, where Googler Pete said he developed this in his 20% time.

He said he is the "developer working on the stereoscopic player as a 20% project." He added that "it's currently very early, hence the silly bugs like swapping the eyes for the anaglyph modes." Peter also shared the various ways to view such videos:

• yt3d:enable=true Enables the view mode. (obviously you've already discovered this)
• yt3d:aspect=3:4 Sets the aspect of the encoded video.
• yt3d:swap=true Swaps the left and right sources. You may need to add this to videos when the player with fixed anaglyph modes ships. Apologies for the inconvineince.
• yt3d:left=0_0.1_0.5_0.9 and yt3d:right=0.5_0.1_1_0.9 These tags are very provisional and most useful for fixing up old videos. They set the source area for each eye as pairs of coordinates x1_y1_x2_y2. The scale of these coordinates is 0,0 for the the top left down to 1,1 for the bottom right.

I spotted a video that is currently experimenting with this over here.

Again, this is a side project for one Googler right now and he did say:

Your feedback and suggestions are welcome, but as this isn't my primary project I can't promise a speedy turnaround with improvements.

I find it pretty cool that this is being done and I have a feeling it might gain a bit of a following by some videographers out there.

Forum discussion at YouTube Help.

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