How To Find And Watch YouTube 3D content

Love it or hate it, 3D is here to stay. It’s a natural progression of visual displays, and I’m kind of bored of hearing it’s a fad. So let’s take this opportunity to look at something which is in fact, quite clearly a fad – yes, YouTube in 3D. Grab those red/blue specs, switch your TV to 3D mode, charge your active shutter glasses, or just go all crossed eyed while I introduce you to the world in 3D, via YouTube.

One the main arguments against 3D is that there simply isn’t enough content. In fact, half of the movies I’ve watched in the last 6 months have been in glorious 3D 1080p HD, so I’d hazard a guess that you’re just not looking the right places. There’s even a dedicated 3D torrent site now (registrations are currently open, by the way). And then we have YouTube – the ultimate media liberator of the people, a place where idiots can be become famous and nothing is kept secret – and right now the best place to find amateur 3D content.

The Technical Stuff:

Head over to YouTube dedicated 3D viewing options page to choose first how you’d like to view 3D content. There’s actually quite a few options available.

Various colored filters for that old-school comic book 3D: This is pretty much the worst kind of 3D you can get and results in horrendous discoloration, but it’s good of them to allow all the combinations and not just traditional red/blue. You also buy an official set of YouTube 3D glasses if you like.

Interleaved, for some 3DTVs and Zalman passive filter viewing methods.

Side-by-Side, for Samsung TVs and people who like to go cross-eyed.

Any 3D video you view will have a little 3D menu in the bottom right where you can quickly access the 3D viewing method page, as well as switch the left/right if it’s reversed, and change the video to full/half width (if you regularly view 3DSBS BlueRay movies, those are run at half-width)

How to Find 3D videos:

There’s three main ways to find 3D content on YouTube. Firstly, when the service was original launched, a special tag of “yt3D:enable=true” had to be applied to get the 3D button and functionality to appear. That’s not true anymore, but there’s an archive of stuff in there and some people are still tagging their videos like that, so it’s worth a look.

Secondly, YouTube has official 3D channel to highlight some of the better videos.

Thirdly, there’s a number of professional and affiliated channels producing fantastic 3D content, so here’s some of the best ones:

ExploreMediaGroup: a good collection of quality content from various sources, mostly trailers and travel videos.

S3D Gamer Zone: My personal favourite, I could watch these game videos and walkthroughs all day. The great thing about game content in 3D is that it’s generally done well and high-res, with none of the bad camera movement and poor video quality that accompanies user-shot content.

iWatch3D: Just a regular guy based in London and into 3D, he films various events and locations.

Of course, just like the regular YouTube 2D the majority of 3D content is so bad I wouldn’t want to waste even a single minute of my life watching it – and those ads at the bottom of the video window are even *more* obnoxious when you’re trying to go cross-eyed. Okay, so maybe you’re not going to find anything to write home about – but it’s innovative, and I like that.

If you’re interested in YouTube, then be sure to check our full range of YouTube tagged articles, as well as these all time favourites:

• 10 YouTube tricks you should know about
• 12 Video sites that are better than YouTube (*gasp*)
• 4 Ways to Download YouTube videos

And for those into 3D, I wrote about how to play games in 3D on your PC on a tight budget.

Do you know of any other online sources for great 3D video? I for one would love to hear about it, so let us know in the comment.