VR and SD card

[TunedM52]

So I purchased the Idol 4S very recently purely as a VR device and a backup phone. I wanted a VR solution that was affordable, and at $288 I couldn't pass it up, plus it's running W10M. Huge bonus because now I have a future replacement for my 950, it feels so slow now with the 808 chip now that I've experienced W10M on an 820.

I've saved ~80GBs worth of F1, WRC, Rally America, and YT vids in 360. The on-board memory doesn't have enough space to store it, so I got a microSD 256GB UHS-I U3 card on amazon and it came today. No problems transferring files and apps over. But I just found out now, through the tutorial of the launcher app, that all content must be stored on the device... really?

The stock VR360Video app won't recognize anything even when copied directly over to the Videos folder of the SD card. Is there no workaround for this? I'm assuming it doesn't, knowing W10M. I downloaded the app VR Video for Windows 10 Mobile and it can see all of the footage, however it does not track head movement. Is there another app that does tracking?

Also, is there any way to make the stock VRLauncher app not open every single time I insert the phone? In order to watch anything using the 3rd party VR app I downloaded, I have to play the video, lock the phone, insert into viewer, then unlock it with my fingerprint. That's the only way so far I've found to bypass the auto-opening action. Very, very annoying.

 

[LanceBoyle44]

Thanks...glad I didn't run out and buy an SD card for this (yet).

I also noticed that you can't have spaces in the file names for (at least) 360 videos; I downloaded a 360 vid from the web, placed it in the indicated phone folder, and the spaces in the name caused the app to think the folder was empty, but worked when I took the spaces out.

Just wanted to add that if anyone can figure out how to play top/bottom split VR videos on this device, it would be greatly appreciated. Hopefully some decent apps are on the way.

 

[TunedM52]

Yep I noticed that too, I had to mass rename all my video files to replace the spaces with an underscore. I really do hope more VR apps get developed for W10M, specifically games.

After a sleepless night of trying to get it to work, I came to the conclusion that there is no way for the default 360VR app to read off the SD card. I'm guessing Alcatel worried that people would put in cheap and slow SD cards which would ruin the experience. Eh, not that big of a deal anyways. I can just copy the video I want to internal storage each time, which is really fast with a UHS-I U3 card (I have the Samsung Evo Plus 256gb). Plus it would be a mess trying to find the right video within the app without the filename displayed.

I'm still curious so if anyone knows of a good 3rd party VR player, and how to disable the auto launching please let me know!

Edit: I connected a BT keyboard and alt-tab works. Problem.. partially solved! This solution works fine for me, just wish there was an option to turn off the auto launching of the default VR app.