How to watch 360 videos on Linux
Andrew Mclaughlin 
My friend has been giving me MP4 files created using his Samsung Gear 360. Is there a way for me to watch them on Linux (for me, Ubuntu) without having to upload them to youtube/facebook?
I tried VLC but that didn't work.
I just want to use the arrow keys to look around the videos, just like facebook/youtube, but on my local system.
5 Answers
- VLC 3.0.0 stable has been released and with the Linux version I'm able to play 360 content!
- I'm using Ubuntu 16.04.
- Install instructions:
I had trouble installing via the vlc PPA so I used Snap to install. Here's how I did it:
sudo apt purge 'vlc*' 'libvlc*'
sudo apt install snapd
sudo snap install vlc # <== note: this is not 'apt'Thanks to @Tomislav Nakic-Alfirevic for notifying us about the recent 3.0 release (Feb 2018).
VLC 3 declares support for 360 video playback with "navigation".
2'Spatial Media Metadata Injector' needs to used with the file to inject metadata, then it will work as a flat picture in VLC 3
0Maybe you are looking for VR Player for Linux because I was in a similar situation as you. The search for suitable software did not materialize. Well, enough to endure it - I decided, and started developing this application. So sht-vr-player appeared, and I hope that it will be useful to you as well as to me.
What can it do?
- View directory, convenient preview of media files.
- Support vr-photo (jpg)
- Support vr-video (mp4 - up to 4K, limitations in chrome, I hope they fix it soon)
- Ability to delete unnecessary media
- Ability to clear accumulated cache
It is available under MIT licence.
5You may install the GoPro VR Player that is available for Linux. It does work for HD on my machine, but is too slow for 4k. Depends on the machine I guess. I did not get VLC 3 to work up to now unfortunately.
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