Question about Youku and VR for Android

February 8, 2017 at 12:42 AM

Recently discovered Youku, downloaded a the Android app, and downloaded a bunch of videos for offline viewing, especially when I'm on a plane. I'm looking to use a VR headset so I can lean back and get comfortable while watching it, but I couldn't figure out a way to split the screen into left and right, so I can watch the video. I see two options, which I don't know how to do either:

1. The Youku app may have a setting for this, turning it into split-screen. I can't read Chinese well and can't find that setting.

2. The downloaded file is currently "youku specific", if I can turn it into a "normal" video file like .avi, I can find a different split-screen Android app that opens that file.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

February 9, 2017 at 03:11 AM

1. Unfortunately Youku player lack any VR related settings, moreover, VR videos, played with Youku player on my android phone, look very weird:

How it looks on Youku video player:

Youku video player settings:

2. Videos downloaded by Youku are encoded with a simple encoding, which prevents them from being played with other players.

On my phone Youku downloads its videos into the following directory, and the video filename is "1", without any extention :

If you copy this file to you computer and open it with Winhex, you will see that the real video starts from 35th byte, and the first 34 bytes are the Youku encoding :

To remove this encoding, you have to select the video data starting from the 35th byte to the end of the file, then press Ctrl+Shift+N to save selected bytes into a new video file:

The resulting video file will be playable by most of the players, for example, this is how it looks on VLC player on my android phone:

As you can see, the video looks much better compare to Youku video player.

February 9, 2017 at 10:14 PM

Thank you for the help.

February 10, 2017 at 10:11 AM

Hello, @ppzhao, I have build a little android app for you, it basically searches for the videos you have downloaded with Youku and let you open them with VLC Player :

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