Recently, Youtube has developed their own propriety encoding scheme for 360-degree videos. Most videos from Youtube which have 2K and 4K resolution have already been converted into this format.
As a result, if you download these videos, you will see the frame is cut and arranged into two rows
The equirectangular is still useful in some niche cases e.g. showing snapshot to represent the video content. In oder to download the equirectangular format, youtube-dl is the best solution:
Install youtube-dl with Python:
Updated (May-10-2023), youtube-dl is obsoleted, now switch to yt-dlp, which has similar syntax
pip install --upgrade yt-dlp
Update youtube-dl to the newest version:
yt-dlp --update
Execute this command to download highest resolution in equirectangular:
yt-dlp -f bestvideo[ext=mp4] --no-check-certificate --user-agent '' URL
The downloaded videos should be in equirectangular format now:
Sometime, a video is in stereoscopic format. The equirectangular frames show two similar parts on top of each other like this:
In order to get the equirectangular, simply discard one part of the frame with ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i [InputVideo] -vf crop=h=in_h/2:y=0 -c:a copy [OutputVideo].
The result is an equirectangular frame.
