Ben S Posted December 7, 2021 Share Posted December 7, 2021 I'm trying to streamline an awkward process. I have a Rylo 360 camera and it creates .MP4 dual spherical video files on its micro SD card that are in the format of the image below. Using the Rylo Android app, I can "stitch" these into a 360 format that gets saved to my phone. Then I can pull the files off my phone (with some hassle) onto my computer, where I can edit the 360 video file in video software. Rylo does not make editing software for Windows and the company is now defunct. What I want to do is remove the micro SD card from the Rylo, put it into my laptop and copy the raw spherical .MP4 files (above) to my PC. Then I want to convert the files the 360 format shown in the image below using the power of my Windows PC. What I'm looking for is a Windows software tool that can do the conversion. The process of converting video files on my phone and moving them to the PC is too slow and awkward. I'm new to 360 video so I'm not sure what software is already out there. I am familiar with FFMPEG from the command line but I haven't found an example of how it can stitch spherical video. Can you recommend any free Windows software that can do this conversion? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ben S Posted December 9, 2021 Author Share Posted December 9, 2021 (edited) Referencing my previous post, the top image is considered dual-fisheye and the bottom is considered equirectangular. I tried using the Ricoh Theta Movie Converter application for Windows, which supposedly will stitch dual-fisheye video into equirectangular but it doesn't recognize the Rylo .MP4 file format. I have started experimenting with FFmpeg (command line video tool) after discovering it had a v360 filter. Unfortunately the Rylo video is tilted 90° and needs to be rotated before stitching occurs. I'm stuck on that part but I have posted the question on Stack Overflow. You can see example images there.https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70284427/stitch-360-fisheye-video-with-ffmpeg Edited December 9, 2021 by Ben S Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ben S Posted January 2, 2022 Author Share Posted January 2, 2022 I finally got an answer from StackOverflow on how to rotate the video during the conversion. The trick is to use the roll=-90 filter. The command below will convert the first 5 seconds of video so you can test it yourself. Remove the -t parameter to convert the entire file. You may need to experiment with the FOV value. As you see I'm putting the FOV in the output filename to help me later compare the different outputs. ffmpeg -t 5 -i RYLO0003.mp4 -preset ultrafast -vf v360=dfisheye:e:ih_fov=189:iv_fov=189:roll=-90 -y RYLO0003_fov189.mp4 As you can see in the image above there are still areas that don't stitch together well. One technique I have heard about is using a mergemap file. It should implement some fading in that area to at least make the seam line fade be blurred. I found a site with examples and spent about 6 hours trying to get them to work. In the end I realized that the instructions didn't actually do what they said they did. When I used their instructions with their test file I didn't get the same results that they did so I suspect the author made a mistake. I'm a bit disappointed that no one in this part of the forum has responded to my post yet. I was under the impression that I would get more help here than in the Facebook group. I will continue to update this post as I get more information on a solution. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tawpie Posted January 2, 2022 Share Posted January 2, 2022 Some progress though? Thanks for posting—you may have found a topic that is foreign to more than just myself... when folks can contribute, they usually don't hesitate. Even though I can't help you solve your issue it is an interesting challenge. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UniBlab Posted January 2, 2022 Share Posted January 2, 2022 I wish I had an answer for ya. Correct me if I'm wrong- you currently must convert the file using the rylo app; what if you instead use an Android emulator on your PC???? Would that be of any help? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ben S Posted January 6, 2022 Author Share Posted January 6, 2022 On 1/1/2022 at 8:29 PM, Tawpie said: Some progress though? Thanks for posting—you may have found a topic that is foreign to more than just myself... when folks can contribute, they usually don't hesitate. Even though I can't help you solve your issue it is an interesting challenge. Thank you for acknowledging me. I was starting to wonder if i was wasting my time. I am posting here instead of Facebook because I feel like this particular topic may be useful to someone down the road. Facebook posts can get a lot of immediate attention, but no one ever searches back for info in old posts. It's hard to carry on a long conversation there without interest jumping to the next post. On 1/1/2022 at 9:07 PM, UniBlab said: I wish I had an answer for ya. Correct me if I'm wrong- you currently must convert the file using the rylo app; what if you instead use an Android emulator on your PC???? Would that be of any help? I can currently "stitch" the video using the Rylo app, but I have to have my phone connected to the camera so I can read from the SD card, and must run my phone from its battery (unless I got a USB-C hub). Another challenge is that 360 video files are huge and I don't have the free space to work with them on my phone. Just transferring files between the camera and the phone is tedious and slow. I want to take the camera and my phone out of the picture. If I just copy the SD card to my computer then I'll have essentially unlimited disk space and the power to let it run long conversions overnight. An Android emulator could be a solution, but I've read that people aren't able to get the Rylo app running in an emulator. It's probably been 10 years since I tried an Android emulator. Do you have one handy that you can test to see if it opens the Rylo app? Ben Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tawpie Posted January 6, 2022 Share Posted January 6, 2022 (edited) You could try running Rylo in Chrome https://www.androidauthority.com/android-apps-on-windows-11-3048569/ Looks like a hassle but if it works... There might be another less hacky option if you have a 2018 or newer chromebook https://www.androidauthority.com/run-android-apps-chromebook-703248/ And of course, there are emulators for PC When I get a chance, I'll try to make some time to fire up the Android SDK and see if Rylo will launch on that emulator. But that's a real hassle. Edited January 6, 2022 by Tawpie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ben S Posted April 21, 2022 Author Share Posted April 21, 2022 Quote I tried running the Rylo app on a newer Samsung Galaxy Tab A and it quickly reports "device not supported". According to the r/rylo forum on Reddit no one has found an emulator it will run in. I'm at the point now where I can cleanly stitch the dual fisheye video into equirectangular with a batch fill calling FFmpeg. There's only one limitation. If the camera is physically rotating, like on a selfie stick, the output that FFmpeg generates rotates just like the camera. This is bad. The Rylo software will keep the orientation upright in every generated frame. This means I can use my method if the recording was taken with a tripod or held constantly upright, but any other orientation creates a headache during editing. If you think you have an answer to this then check out my question on Stack Exchange: https://superuser.com/questions/1716892/ffmpeg-preserving-360-video-orientation Thanks for keeping this thread alive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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