3D

Starting in v13, Kodi supports a number of passive 3D video formats such as SBS, TAB, anaglyph or interlaced. This support extends to the Kodi GUI including subtitles and on-screen-controls.

3D Kodi capable player info

See Kodi Forum discussion

Displays

3D support

As of 2025, the only widely available option for home theater 3D are home theater projectors, mostly from chinese or taiwanese manufacturers. A few glasses free displays have appeared on the market, but most of them are for desktop gaming and are thus only available in smaller sizes.

As of about 2018...2019, new flat-screen TV do not have classical 3D support anymore - passive 3D (polarizing glasses) or active 3D (shutter glasses).

As of ca. 2021 - 2025, new projectors from mayor japanese brands do not support 3D anymore except in high-end models. For example JVC LX-NZ30 ($3,800) DLA-NZ5000 ($6,000), DLA-RS1200 ($7,000), DLA-NZ700 ($9,000), DLA-RS2200 ($10000) do all not support 3D.

Display Types

Passive 3D Displays

Passive-3D is the common name given to displays where 3D can be viewed with a pair of polarizing glasses, depending on system horizontal/vertical polarizing or circular polarizing.

Passive 3D displays are watched with polarizing glasses.

Passive 3D LCD and OLED displays have a layer of alternatively polarizing lines on top, typically horizontal. FullHD (1920x1080) display can therefore not display FullHD 3D, but instead each eye only receives a 540x1080 image. achieve support for passive-3D. 4K display with passive 3D support can support FullHD without loss of resolution because they can display 3840x1080 to each eye.

Movie theaters almost exclusively use passive 3D, but have various methods how to support it. There are no home theater options for passive 3D projection except for rigging up two projectors with polarization filter, appropriate silver screen (to maintain polarization) and splitting of Left/Right video signals.

Active 3D Displays

Active 3D displays are watched with active-shutter glasses that operate on a battery and receive a signal from the display indicating when to switch between left and right eye display. Home Theater projectors that do support 3D use active 3D.

RF glasses

LCD/LCOS (Epson, Sony, JVC, ...) projectors use RF glasses to signal to the glasses when to switch between left and right eye. These glasses are typically not compatible across different brands.

DLP-Link

DLP projectors use the so-called DLP-Link protocol from Texas Instruments and are thus compatible across all DLP projectors supporting active 3D. DLP-Link supports frequences of 100Hz, 120 Hz and 144 Hz. With 144 Hz, a 24 fps 3D video has each frame displayed 3 times sequentially: "L R L R L R L R". With 120 Hz, each 24 fps frame is displayed only 5 times, alternating frames with the pattern frame1: "L R L R L", frame2: "R L R L R", thus creating some slight motion judder.

In DLP-Link, the signal to switch between left and right eye is a short flash of light in the vertical blanking interval between frames. This may have different colors depending on brand and can be seen as a color tint of the video signal when watching without activated DLP-Link glasses. This tint is not seen through the glasses because moth left and right eye LCD shutters are closed during the vertical blanking interval.

DLP-Link does indicate through timing when the left or right eye image are displayed. This signaling sometimes seems to be difficult to maintain in cdrtain brands of projector displays. It is hence advisable to use DLP-Link glasses which can simply switch the left/right eye mapping on the press of a button, a feature not all DLP-Link glasses support.

Glasses free 3D

As of 2026, the two widely available desktop, glasses-free 3D displays are the Samsung 27" Odyssey 3D (G90XF) 4K UHD monitor. Running on Windows 11 with an NVidia GPU, it can display FullHD 3D from applications that can display 3D as fullscreen, Full-SBS (such as Kodi). Acer provides a series of 3D monitors called the SpatialLabs Monitor Family.

FullHD resolution issues

When buying a display for use with 3D, be sure to check the 3D resolution of your display by watching the [MVC Resolution Pattern] video from Samples#3D_Formats and observe whether you see all horizontal and vertical white lines in the top two rows of the 3x3 resolution lines block of the test patterns.

As of 2025, several projectors released in 2024 and 2025 claiming support for FullHD 3D do not display FullHD 3D in its native 1920x1080 resolution but instead only provide a resolution similar to that of passive 3D TV, with a resolution of 1920x540 per eye. See discussion at: 3D display discussion thread (2025).

The following table captures known working and non-working displays.

• If you want information about displays you know to be entered to the table, ideally do it yourself, it's not difficult to get an account on this wiki. If you're worried about table formatting, just write freeeform text into the "AddToTable" section.
• Primarily check resolution of the MVC version of the resolution pattern video. If you have a 4k capable display, you may want to try at least also the FSBS version, ideally from a media player whose video output is set to 60Hz. If the projector can switch automatically, that is also very useful information. Any more information about the projector 3D capabilities is ideally put into an appropriate forum post and the URL put into the notes column.

Display	FP	SBS	TAB	FSBS	FTAB	Notes
Epson 5050UB (2019)	✔ (auto)	✔ (auto)	✔ (auto)	-	-	[1]
AWOL Vision LTV 2500/3000/3500/	✔	?	?	?	?	[2], [3]
Hisense C2 Ultra (2024)	ERR:TAB	?	?	?	?	Vidaa OS, not Google OS.(no verification image found yet, see [4])
Hisense PX3 Pro (2024)	ERR:TAB	?	?	?	?	[5]
NexiGo Nova Mini (2025)	ERR:TAB	?	?	?	?	Mediatek MT9630, [6]
NexiGo Aurora Pro MKII (2025)	✔	✔	✔	No	No	[7] FullSBS/TAB are rendered as HalfSBS/TAB
NexiGo TriVision Ultra	✔	?	?	?	?	[8]
Optoma ZH406 (2019)	✔	?	?	?	?	[9], [10]
Valerion Pro2, Max (series) (2025)	ERR:TAB (auto)	ERR:960x540	ERR:TAB	ERR:TAB (auto)	ERR:TAB	MediaTek MT9618 (Pro2, Max), [11] [12] [13], FSBS auto: [14]
XGIMI Horizon 20 Max (series) (2025)	ERR:TAB 60Hz	ERR:960x540 60Hz	ERR:TAB 60Hz	ERR:TAB 60Hz	ERR:TAB 60Hz	MediaTek MT9679, [15]
XGIMI Horizon 20 Max (series) FW 1.3.125	✔ 60Hz	✔ 60Hz	✔ 60Hz	✔ 60Hz	✔ 60Hz	MediaTek MT9679, Fixed Firmware [16]

AddToTable:

Legend:

• (series) Only the indicated model was tested, but the data is believed to apply to all model variations in the series.
• ? - Information not provided by any user. Ability to get full resolution at FP (✔) is sufficient for Blu Ray 3D payback as long as a Blu Ray Player or Media Player with support for this format is used. FSBS/FTAB support is mostly interesting as a workaround or when 60fps is supported, or when media is present in these formats but no media player to convert to FP video signal. SBS/TAB formats are lower quality and may be of interest for the same reasons.
• (auto) - display switches automatically to 3D decoding when signal is received with HDMI 1.4 InfoFrame indicating the signal type. Else display requires manual enabling of 3D decoding for the signal. Current understanding is that InfoFrame signaling to trigger automatic decoding only is specified for FP@25fps and SBS/TAB for maybe up to 60fps, but not for FSBS, FTAB (they likely always require manual enabling of 3D mode on the display).
• FP - HDMI 1.4 "Frame Packed" FullHD 1920x1080@24fps 3D as per HDMI 1.4 3D spec. This video signal is generated by blu Ray players playing a 3D Blu Ray disc.
• SBS - "Side By Side" 3D. Per eye 960x1080, arranged side by side, total video size 1920x1080. Without additional fps indication, support for only 24fps is assumed. Part of HDMI 1.4 3D spec.
• TAB - "Top And Bottom" 3D. Per eye 1920x540, arranged top and bottom, total video size 1920x1080. Without additional fps indication, support for only 24fps is assumed. Part of HDMI 1.4 3D spec.
• FSBS - "Full Side By Side" 3D. Per eye 1920x1080, arranged side by side, total video size 3840x1080. Without additional fps indication, support for only 24fps is assumed. Not part of HDMI 1.4 3D spec. Common resolution format for VR glasses. FSBS encoded 3D video can be displayed as FSBS without media player knowing about 3D (without subtitles).
• FTAB "Full Top And Bottom" 3D. Per eye 1920x1080, arranged top and bottom, total video size 1920x2160. Without additional fps indication, support for only 24fps is assumed. Not part of HDMI 1.4 3D spec. FTAB encoded 3D video can be displayed as FTAB without media player knowing about 3D (without subtitles).
• 60Hz - Format can be decoded not only with 24fps, but also up to the indicated Hz (e.g.: 60Hz). This is relevant for supporting stereoscopic 3D gaming which typically requires 60Hz or higher to be sufficiently fast enough.
• ERR: - the visual resolution is in error and is best described by the following resolution or abbreviation thereof. Specifically, ERR:TAB indicates that the visual resolution is only like 1920x540 when provided with a 1920x540 resolution video per eye.
• For further details see notes and/or URLs in the notes column

Warning: Much of the text below has not been updated since Kodi 18 and may include outdated information. Please help to improve it.

Theory of Operations

3D can be encoded in the video file in a variety of methods and displayed on the output device in yet another variety of methods. When Kodi can decode the video file and knows how 3D is encoded in it, it can then transform the decoded video to the desired output method. In that case Kodi can also render its GUI according to the desired output method, making the GUI naturally useable during playback.

The most popular 3D formats encode left and right images of the 3D frame inside a 2D frame and can therefore be supported with any Kodi supported video file encoding (typically h264/h265(hevc) with mkv container format). For example, in (half) Side-By-Side (SBS) a left eye 960x1080 and a right eye 960x1080 frame are combined side-by-side into a full HD 1920x1080 frame. In (half) Top-And-Bottom (TAB), a left eye 1920x540 and a right eye 1920x540 frame are combined top and bottom into a full HD 1920x1080 frame.

Either of these formats can be played back onto a HDMI 1.4 compatible display even without the player (Kodi or any other) knowing that they are 3D. The display can then (usually manually) be set to decode the 3D content, and then displays it for active or passive shutter glasses (depending on the type of 3D display). If Kodi is unaware of the video being 3D, it will render its GUI across the whole 2D frame, so that it becomes gibberish after 3D decoding by the display.

Typically, Kodi is aware of the 3D encoding of the video, see the section "How Kodi does 3D detection". In that that case it will transform the 3D format of the video after decoding to the desired output mode for the display, for example converting SBS to TAB or vice versa, or even to anamorphic which can be played back on any display using colored (plastic) glasses.

HDMI 3D

HDMI 1.4/2.0/2.1 support SBS and TAB formats with 24, 50 and 60Hz but only up tofull-HD resolution of 1920x1080. Larger size SBS/TAB such as full SBS (3840x1080) or full TAB (1920x2160) can be played back by Kodi but will be scaled down to 1920x1080 for HDMI displays, resulting in a loss of half the horizontal (SBS) or vertical (TAB) resolution.

For full HD 3D resolution on a HDMI display the system must render a HDMI 1.4 frame-packing signal (unchanged in HDMI 2.0/2.1). This is the format used by Blu Ray 3D players. It is a 1920x2205 signal constituting of full-HD top and bottom left and eye frames separated by 45 lines of blanking. It is only supported by HDMI at 24 fps or at 1280x720 resolution with 50/60Hz. Support for this output format is platform specific. See Platform specific info below. If Kodi supports this output format, it is usually enabled (Kodi 17) via the "Hardware based" output method in Kodi and can be used to play back full SBS/TAB videos without loss of resolution.

Limitations

MVC software decoding not supported

Kodi does not yet support software video decoding of MVC (Multiview Video Coding) encoded 3D videos, which is the format most commonly used in raw Blu-ray 3D backups/rips (and on original Blu-ray Disc media with stereoscopic video.

However, hardware decoding of MVC (Multiview Video Coding) encoded 3D videos is supported in Kodi on some platforms/operating-systems if the device drivers and hardware supports it, like it does for the Raspberry Pi. For hardware decoding Kodi relies on the SoC/VPU/GPU chipset hardware manufacturer to add support for this to their SDK (Software Developer Kits) and for the media player box manufacturers to implement that into their API, firmware, kernel, and/or device drivers images as needed.

For software video decoding Kodi depends on the third-party decoder libraries from the (ffmpeg.org) project as well as code from its sister-project Libav (libav.org). The fact is that Kodi developers will not be ablle to add support software video decoding of MVC encoded 3D videos until the developers of those upstream projects have written and added code for it first, and those projects are just like Kodi also non-profit organizations run by volunteers working for free so it is impossible to estimate when (if ever) someone will write and add code for MVC decoding support to FFmpeg and/or Libav (which is needed before it can be added to Kodi).

For some Kodi forum discussion please see: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=227862 or for more information read the wikipedia article about MVC (Multiview Video Coding)

Developers might also want to read this development-oriented description written by the Libav (and FFmpeg) developers on their wiki here: http://wiki.libav.org/Blueprint/MVC as well as a very descriptive blog-post which explains why software video decoding of MVC is so hard to code into FFmpeg/Libav: http://blogs.gentoo.org/lu_zero/2014/04/04/the-road-to-mvc/ (posted by Luca Barbato and Vittorio who have been two of the lead developers in the FFmpeg and Libav projects for the past 10-years).

Interface and menus

INCOMPLETE: This page or section is incomplete. Please add information or correct uncertain data which is marked with a ?

How Kodi does 3D detection

Kodi has three ways to detect whether a videofile is a 3D video. These methods are checked in the following order:

Embedded streaminfo

First, Kodi tries to detect the stereoscopic mode for a video when extracting streamdetails from the videofile.

One of the supported fields is the 'Stereomode' field in the Matroska specification: http://matroska.org/technical/specs/index.html#StereoMode

Manual selection

When playing a video, you can bring up the video settings dialog to manually select the stereoscopic mode.

If you've done this before, Kodi will remember this setting and use it as the second method to detect the stereoscopic mode of a videofile.

Video filenames flags

See also: Naming video files

The third and final method is detection through the filename of the video.

Kodi uses regular expressions to check for certain flags in the filename.

In order to properly detect the stereomode, two tags need to be present in the filename. First, a '3D' tag has to be present that matches the following regex: [-. _]3d[-. _]

In addition to this, either a 'SBS' tag [-. _]h?sbs[-. _] or a 'TAB' flag [-. _]h?tab[-. _] must be present in the filename.

You can customize these regular expressions through the Advancedsettings.xml file.

Regex matching is done case-insensitive, so for example either .3d. and .3D. will work.

Note: the tags need be be surrounded be either a hyphen -, space  , dot . or underscore _.

See the table below for some examples:

3D	Stereoscopic side-by-side	Stereoscopic top-and-bottom
.3D.	.sbs.	.tab.
-3d-	.SBS.	.TAB.
3d	.HSBS.	.HTAB.
_3d_	-hsbs-	-htab-
.3D-	_sbs_	_tab_
3D.	SBS	TAB
.3D	sbs	tab
	-SBS	-TAB
	HSBS_	HTAB_

Filename examples

• moviename (year).3d.hsbs.mkv
• moviename 3d sbs.mkv
• moviename.3D-HTAB.mkv
• moviename-3D.sbs-720p.mkv

See also: Media_flags#Video_flags

For other filename flags examples.

Subtitiles

?

Platform specific info

General

• Hardware acceleration is not provided for full SBS or full TAB movies, meaning users will need playback hardware with adequate CPU power.
• Kodi's "window mode" in Settings -> System -> Video output must use normal "Full screen" and not "Full screen window".

Windows

Starting with version 8.1, Windows supports HDMI 1.4 frame packing, and Kodi on Windows can therefore not only render to half-SBS/TAB HDMI output formats, but also full-HD 3D (at 24 Hz) via the "Hardware based" output method to HDMI displays supporting HDMI 3D. This should work across all GPUs (Intel, Nvidia, ARM, tested for this text on Intel, Nvidia). This does not require any MVC specific build of Kodi.

Intel GPU

On Intel GPU, HDMI 1.4 3D support may require the GPU to support InTru 3D. With IntTru 3D, HDMI 1.4 3D full-HD (1080p@24) is supported on Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 (unclear if Kodi supports this on Windows 7, unclear if Intel article just forgot to mention Windows 10 or if there is a change in support).

NVidia GPU

HDMI 1.4 3D capable displays

When connecting a HDMI 1.4 frame packing 3D capable HDMI display to an NVidia GPU, "Enable stereoscopic 3D" must be enabled in Windows NVidia Control Panel to use it. In Kodis "stereoscopic 3D mode" selection, this enables "Hardware based" for that display. It also enables the "HD 3D" modes 1080p24 and 720p50/60 in the NVidia Control Panels "Change resolution" section. These resolutions do not need to be selected explicitly to play back 3D in Kodi, instead set "Hardware based" as the default 3D optoin and enable frame rate switching in Kodi. Kodi will then automatically switch to 1080p24 frame packing when playing back 3D videos.

When stereoscopic 3D is enabled in the NVidia Control Panel for such a HDMI display, there is no separate "2D" 1080p24 option anymore. Kodi can therefore only use the "3D" 1080p24 frame packing mode when playing back 24fps videos (without any 3D effect of course). Active 3D capable HDMI displays often enable their IR transmitter when frame packing mode is selected. This can be irritating when the IR transmitter disturbs other IR remotes and only a 2D video is shown. It may then be necessary to switch between 2D/3D on the display manually or enable stereoscopic 3D on the NVidia Control Panel manually only before playing 3D.

NVidia 3DTV Play

By default, the NVidia Control Panel shows "HDMI Blu-Ray 3D" as the "Stereoscopic 3D display type" under "Enable stereoscopic 3D" for HDMI 1.4 capable displays and there is no other option. When NVIDIA 3DTV Play is active on the system, "HDMI Blu-Ray 3D" is not available anymore, but instead "3DTV Play" must be selected to enable HDMI 1.4 frame packing resolutions. NVIDIA 3DTV Play is neither necessary nor beneficial for Kodi nor other Blu-Ray DVD playback software for video playback with HDMI 1.4 frame packing.

NVidia 3DTV is an optional and separately sold software from NVidia primarily for rendering 3D games in HDMI 1.4 stereoscopic 3D. It is also enabled automatically for free when an NVidia 3D Vision USB IR emitter is connected to the PC. That emitter services no purpose for HDMI 1.4 display, it solely serves as a dongle so customers of the NVidia 3D Vision kit (including emitter and glasses) can get NVIDIA 3DTV Play for free if they have both NVidia 3DTV Vision capable display and HDMI 1.4 display connected to their PC. See http://www.nvidia.com/object/3dtv-play-compare.html.

When NVIDIA 3DTV Play is active, Kodi may display during startup a red warning onscreen that the selected resolution is incompatible with HDMI 1.4 3D. This is NVIDIA 3DTV Play recognizing Kodi as a 3D application. The warning will go away after some time and can simply be ignored.

NVidia 3D Vision

NVidia 3D Vision uses 3D active shutter glassses in conjunction with (certified for NVidia 3D Vision) DisplayPort PC Displays at 100/120/144 Hz. This can be used to display 3D video up to the full display resolution of the display used. In the NVidia Control Panel, Stereoscopic 3D needs to be enabled, then a resolution with >= 100Hz refresh rate needs to be choosen. 144Hz is best for 24p material to avoid motion judder. In Kodi, "Adjust display refresh rate" must be disabled (or else 3D vision gets enabled when Kodi switches to 24p fps) and "Hardware based" output method must be choosen. Tested with Windows 10, Kodi 17.6 for this paragraph (01/2018).

ARM (Android, iOS, Raspberry Pi)

• 3D modes anaglyph and interlaced are not currently supported on ARM platforms (such as Android, iOS, Raspberry Pi, or other linux-based ARM distros) due to those platforms using OpenGLES rather than OpenGL or DirectX.

Other guides

• brazen1's 3D guide: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=229692

See also

• Samples