Open any VR video player and you'll find settings labelled SBS, TB, 180° and 360°. Nothing tells you which one your file needs, so you cycle through them, and each wrong guess makes the picture look broken in a different way.
The awkward part is that the file usually doesn't declare its own format. The player either guesses or asks you. But there's a reliable way to work it out, and once you've done it a few times it takes seconds.
First, the thing that trips most people up: these labels belong to two independent axes. Confuse them and you'll never land on the right combination.
| Axis | Settings | What it decides |
|---|---|---|
| Projection | 2D / 180° / 360° | How much of the space around you the image covers |
| Stereo layout | Mono / SBS / TB | Whether each eye gets its own image, and how the two are packed |
They multiply together. "360° mono" is a thing; so is "180° SBS"; so is "360° TB". That's why a player asks you to set two things rather than one.
Everything around you is captured — front, back, sides, up and down. Turn around and you'll see what was behind the camera. This is what 360° cameras produce.
Flattened out, this becomes an equirectangular image: the same projection used for world maps. It's a wide rectangle, and the closer you get to the top and bottom edges, the more everything is stretched sideways. That smeared sky and smeared ground is the giveaway.
Only the forward half is captured. Turn around and there's nothing there. The reasoning is that people mostly look in one direction, so those pixels are better spent on what's in front of you. At the same file resolution, 180° gives noticeably sharper detail ahead than 360° does.
Flattened, it looks roughly square, bulging in the middle and falling away in a circle at the edges.
An ordinary, non-VR video. A VR player handles this by placing a large virtual screen in front of you and projecting onto it — useful for watching a normal film in a headset.
Depth requires showing each eye a slightly different image. VR video does this by packing both eyes into a single video frame and letting the player split it at playback time.
| Layout | Also called | How it's packed |
|---|---|---|
| SBS | Side-by-Side, LR, 3dh | Left half is the left eye, right half is the right eye |
| TB | Top-Bottom, OU, Over-Under, 3dv | Top half is the left eye, bottom half is the right eye |
| Mono | 2D, monoscopic | Both eyes see the same image. No depth |
Mono footage has no stereo depth, but you still get the sense of being surrounded by the scene. Most 360° camera footage is mono.
Three steps.
Not a VR player — a regular one, or even just the thumbnail. You want to see the flattened image as it actually is.
The two copies look almost identical. Compare them closely and you'll see a slight shift in viewpoint — that shift is the depth.
You can narrow things down a long way from the aspect ratio alone. Once you know the pattern, this is the fastest method.
| Example resolution | Aspect | Most likely format |
|---|---|---|
| 7680×3840 / 5760×2880 / 3840×1920 | 2:1 | 360° mono, or 180° SBS |
| 7680×7680 / 3840×3840 | 1:1 | 360° TB, or 180° mono |
| 7680×1920 | 4:1 | 360° SBS (uncommon) |
| 3840×7680 | 1:2 | 180° TB (uncommon) |
Why 2:1 files are the confusing ones. A full 360° sphere flattened into one frame is 2:1. A 180° image is 1:1 per eye — and putting two of those side by side also gives 2:1. Two completely different formats land on the same aspect ratio, so resolution alone can't settle it.
When you hit this, go back to step 2. Two near-identical images side by side means 180° SBS. One continuous panorama means 360° mono.
Distributed VR video often encodes the format in the filename. It's a convention rather than a standard, but it's usually reliable.
| String in the filename | Meaning |
|---|---|
_LR / _3dh / _SBS | SBS (side-by-side) |
_TB / _OU / _3dv | TB (top-bottom) |
_180 / _180x180 / VR180 | 180° |
_360 / _360x180 | 360° |
_MONO / _2D | Mono (no stereo) |
So sample_180x180_3dh_LR.mp4 reads as 180°, side-by-side.
You can also just cycle the settings and diagnose from the result. In practice this is often quicker.
| What it looks like in the headset | Cause and fix |
|---|---|
| Two small copies of the image floating in your view | Stereo is set to mono. Switch to SBS or TB |
| Everything looks vertically stretched | SBS footage set to TB, or the other way round |
| Near objects appear far away; your eyes tire quickly | The eyes are swapped. Switch SBS/TB, or look for a left-right swap option |
| Fine straight ahead, but turning your head stretches and cuts off the image | 180° footage set to 360° |
| There's image behind you, but heavily distorted | 360° footage set to 180° |
Swapped eyes is the one people miss. The picture still looks broadly correct, so nothing obviously flags it as wrong. But your brain spends the whole time reconciling contradictory depth cues, which produces fatigue and motion sickness surprisingly fast. If VR video tires you out for no clear reason, check this first.
3dh, LR, TB, 180, 360OctaVR is an Android VR video player that lets you set projection (180° / 360° / 2D) and stereo layout (SBS / TB) independently of each other — and change both without taking the headset off. No more put-on, wrong, take-off, adjust, repeat.
Menus can be driven entirely by head movement: look down and a control panel fades in, hold your gaze on a button and it activates. There's field-of-view and IPD adjustment, plus a correction for when the phone sits slightly off-centre in the headset. 8K hardware playback is supported, with an on-device conversion for files that stutter. Free to try.
If playback itself is the problem rather than the format, see Why 8K VR video stutters on Android — and how to fix it.