Bigscreen codecs that definitely work are h265 codec for video and aac for audio.
I am recently experimenting with Oculus Quest 2, and wanted to watch a regular 2D video in VR, mirroring the theater experience. It was awesome!
The quality of the actual video was superb, the environment added additional ambiance and I finished the movie feeling like I’m sitting in an actual cinema.
I used an app called Bigscreen VR, and it was superb. The only problem was that it couldn’t play some videos, so I had to reencode them.
Bigscreen can’t play some videos, and the voice is muted on others
Bigscreen claims to play most formats of videos, but that wasn’t the case for me. Clearly, some video and audio codecs were a no-no, but it’s not documented anywhere. I checked all the videos in my library and compared how they work.
I couldn’t put my finger on why some h264 videos worked, and others didn’t, but every single h265 worked, so I resorted to reencoding them in this format.
Similarly, aac seems to work for audio, so I reencoded my video with aac.
Using ffmpeg to encode your video with proper codecs for bigscreen
Here is a command that will encode your video using h265 codec for video and AAC codec for audio:
ffmpeg -i in.mkv -c:v libx265 -c:a aac out.mkv - Install ffmpeg for your platform
- Reencode your video
- Upload the video to Oculus – honestly I had to resort to uploading the video to local server and downloading from there since I couldn’t figure out how to transfer files
- Play the video in Bigscreen VR