What is Blu-ray 3D?

The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) created a task force made up of executives from the film industry and the consumer electronics and IT sectors to help define standards for putting 3-D film and 3-D television content on a Blu-ray Disc. On Dec. 17, 2009 the BDA officially announced 3D specs for Blu-ray Disc, allowing backward compatibility with current 2D Blu-ray players. The BDA has said, "The Blu-ray 3D specification calls for encoding 3D video using the "Stereo High" profile defined by Multiview Video Coding (MVC), an extension to the ITU-T H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) codec currently supported by all Blu-ray Disc players. MPEG4-MVC compresses both left and right eye views with a typical 50% overhead compared to equivalent 2D content, and can provide full 1080p resolution backward compatibility with current 2D Blu-ray Disc players." This means the MVC (3D) stream is backward compatible with H.264/AVC (2D) stream, allowing older 2D devices and software to decode stereoscopic video streams, ignoring additional information for the second view.

Sony has released a firmware upgrade for PlayStation 3 consoles that enables 3D Blu-ray Disc playback. However, when playing in 3D mode, the PlayStation 3 will downgrade high-def audio (such as Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD) to standard Dolby Digital or DTS, as HDMI 1.3 does not provide enough bandwidth for both 3D video and high-def audio. They previously released support for 3D gaming on April 21, 2010 (followed by availability of 3D Movies).