Video Players

Getting videos to play in Go can be a frustrating experience, which is sad because a nicely done video is one of the premier joys of VR. There is allegedly some update or app or something to let you watch VR Youtube videos. This one of the biggest flaws with Go right now. I've tried several video players on many Youtube videos and none of them look right. Even many of the Facebook videos look terrible and suffer from giantism where you are a one foot tall being floating in midair surrounded by low res people 5 times your size. Other videos show me all four corners of the screen in the center of my vision. Talk about useless.

Many of the best and easiest experiences are in dedicated apps like amaze and NextVR. If you can find straight ahead 3D Side by Side videos (SBS) that are in the 2K to 4K range you should be able to play them in the included Oculus Video Player or Oculus Gallery. Oddly what looks weird in one might work in the other. If you can get they videos to work and a they have the correct scale, the these two apps play the best looking video. There is some Carmack magic or other at work here as the videos seem more immersive and better lit than the same video in other players.

It is important to note that 3D and two pictures in a frame are important here. There are lots of 2D 360 or 180 movies which are just 2D pictures stitched together. These are not VR and they all suffer from giantism. Your eyes need two separate images to create 3D for your brain and to tell your brain relative distance. Here you are feeding the same image to both your lenses and you might as well be a cyclops. There are also mono 3D images and these don't work right either. Look at the video in a regular player like VLC on your computer. If you see two very similar objects in the same video and both look oddly stretched then they might work.

Samsung VR will play quite a few different formats and is pretty good at auto detecting the format. Even if it can't auto detect the film's format, it lets you scroll through something like a dozen format to see if you can find the right fit. If this won't play it, it probably can't be played currently on your Go. Oddly the many video clips it lets you stream all suffer from giantism. Come on Samsung!

Skybox and Pigasus both allow you to do things like zoom and pan the movie. I have glasses and really bad eyes and some movies seem to be way too close, zooming out a bit makes them watchable. Also zooming and panning and the like can make some off-scale videos somewhat watchable.