Spatial Film AirStream · Free for Mac
Apple Vision Pro won't play a 3D movie in 3D. It shows you a flat, doubled image — two squashed pictures, side by side. It won't open an MKV at all. And your VR180 and 360° footage sits there unrecognised.
Your 3D movie today. Two pictures, squashed side by side.
Why it happens
A 3D movie is stored as two pictures squashed side by side inside one frame. Every 3D TV and Blu-ray player knows to pull them apart. Vision Pro doesn't — not on its own, and not through any media server. It plays the frame exactly as it finds it.
No setting fixes this. AirStream writes the missing signal in — without re-encoding a single frame — and the same movie suddenly plays with real depth.
Do this once
Open AirStream, click Add Folder, and choose wherever your films live. An external drive, a NAS mount, your Movies folder — add as many as you like.
Why it mattersYour films stay exactly where they are on your Mac — AirStream reads them in place and never touches your originals.
Click Start Streaming. Put the headset on, open Spatial Film, go to the AirStream tab. Your Mac appears by itself — nothing to type, nothing to pair.
Why it mattersFor a lot of people this alone is the whole app: your entire library on the headset, streamed straight from your Mac. Nothing is copied across and nothing is re-encoded — so your films use none of the Vision Pro's storage. The kind you can't add later, and paid Apple handsomely for.
Drag a 3D movie onto Make 3D — Instant.
Why it's fast, and why it costs you nothingAirStream doesn't re-encode your film. It writes the missing 3D signal into the file and copies the video across untouched — not one frame is recompressed. A three-hour movie finishes in minutes, not hours, and the picture is identical to your original. You are not trading quality for 3D. You're telling Vision Pro what it's looking at.
Vision Pro cannot open MKV files. Not "plays them poorly" — cannot open them. So today, your MKV library is simply invisible on your headset. Choose MKV → Vision Pro (2D) and they exist.
Why it mattersAnother rewrap, not a re-encode. Same video, repackaged into a container Vision Pro understands. Fast, lossless, and suddenly your MKVs are there.
VR180 and 360° are not Apple formats. Vision Pro's native player can't decode them with hardware acceleration — so your own immersive footage never plays the way Apple's immersive films do.
Choose Immersive 180 or Immersive 360 and AirStream transcodes it into Apple's own immersive format — MV-HEVC / APMP.
Why it mattersYour footage now plays through Apple's native immersive pipeline, hardware-decoded, at the full quality the headset can deliver. The same path Apple Immersive Video itself takes. It is the only way your VR180 gets there.
An on-device AI depth model looks at ordinary 2D video, works out the depth of every shot, and rebuilds it as real stereo 3D. Your old home videos. The films that never got a 3D release. Anything flat you wish you could step into.
Your VHS baby tapes are not training data.
The model runs on your Mac. The whole thing, start to finish. Nothing is uploaded. Nothing waits in a queue behind ten thousand strangers. No terms of service quietly reserving the right to "use your content to improve our services." There isn't even an account it could be uploaded to.
Why it mattersThis is the most ambitious thing in the app, and it is experimental — expect it to be slow, and to show artifacts on fine detail. But it is turning flat footage into depth, on your own machine, for free.
They're not better and worse — they're different, and they're both free.
Lossless and fast. Your film exactly as it left the disc, now in 3D.
Apple's immersive presentation, with soft, feathered edges. Most 3D movies have a moment where something crosses the frame edge and the 3D fights itself — Spatial Video dissolves that boundary away. And because Vision Pro tracks your eyes and aligns each view to your own pupils, the depth lands where your eyes expect it — so it stays easy to watch, even through a long film.
Best of all on films photographed with real 3D cameras rather than converted afterwards — Avatar: Fire and Ash and its kind. That's when it stops feeling like a screen.
Can't decide? Convert a film both ways. Spatial Film shows you both versions side by side and lets you pick which one to watch tonight.
See it on a real film
This is an actual 3D movie frame — a left eye and a right eye, packed into one picture. Study the edges and you'll catch it: everything sits a few pixels apart between the two. That shift is the depth. It's the whole trick, and it is already sitting in your file.
Vision Pro puts both halves on screen, squeezed, and the depth never arrives. Make 3D — Instant tells it which half is which.
A real 3D film frame. Two eyes, each squeezed to half width.
Or convert it to Spatial
A 3D film ends at a hard rectangular edge. Anything reaching toward you gets sliced off by that edge, and your eyes are handed two answers about where it actually is. That quiet argument is what most people are feeling when they say 3D tires them out.
Convert the same film to Spatial and the border feathers away instead of cutting. The window dissolves, the argument stops, and the picture just sits in the room with you. It's the format to reach for on a long night.
It has the most to work with when the film was actually shot on two cameras rather than converted after the fact — real parallax in every frame, and Spatial puts all of it in the room.
The same frame, in Spatial. The picture doesn't stop — it dissolves. Nothing reaching toward you gets clipped, because there's no hard edge left to clip against.
If you use Plex
There is no concept of stereo anywhere in it — a 3D movie is just a video file as far as Plex is concerned. So on Vision Pro, your 3D collection plays flat and doubled, and no Plex setting will ever change that.
Spatial Film signs in to your own Plex server and browses your own library — posters, titles, summaries, watch state, Continue Watching. Tap a 3D movie that hasn't been converted and it tells you exactly why it can't play in 3D, and what to do about it.
Convert it once with Make 3D — Instant and the film stays right where it was — same poster, same information — now playing in real stereo 3D. The broken double-image copy is hidden, so you can't tap it by mistake.
Your Plex library. In real 3D. Nothing else does this.
The honest version
Free, forever. It makes your library great on your own headset — and that part should simply be free.
Download AirStream — Free
The app is free. The download lives on my Patreon, and signing up is free too.
That's the only thing I ask for it — a way to reach you.
When there's a new version of AirStream, you'll hear about it. When I post a new
3D or Apple Vision Pro tutorial on my channels, you'll hear about that too. And when I
finish a new immersive film, you'll be among the first to see it.
No payment, no card, no tier. Just the download, the occasional note from the filmmaker who made you a
free app — and, unavoidably, photographs of Kimchi, the Shiba Inu who runs the loading
screens and believes he built this.
Notarized by Apple. Every build is sent to Apple, scanned and approved before it ships —
the same process behind every Mac app you install from outside the App Store.
And there's a whole cinema waiting
Immersive films shot in 180° and 360°, Apple Immersive Video, and a growing catalogue you can watch tonight.
View on the App StoreQuestions
Yes. No account, no sign-in, no trial, no watermark. It makes your own library work on your own headset, and that should be free.
A 3D movie is stored as two pictures squashed side by side inside one frame. Nothing in the file tells Apple Vision Pro that it's 3D, so it plays the frame exactly as it finds it — a flat, doubled image. AirStream writes the missing signal into the file, without re-encoding, and the same movie then plays with real depth.
No — Apple Vision Pro cannot open MKV files at all. AirStream's MKV → Vision Pro (2D) conversion repackages the same video losslessly into a container the headset can play.
No. AirStream streams from your Mac to your headset over your own Wi-Fi. Nothing is uploaded, and there's no account it could be uploaded to.
So your headset can find your Mac. That's the whole feature. Without it you'd be typing in an IP address by hand.
No. A conversion always writes a new file and never modifies the original. If a lossless conversion succeeds, AirStream will offer to move the original to the Trash — recoverable, and only if you say yes.
Apple Immersive Video (AIVU), Apple Projected Media Profile (APMP), VR180 in 3D and 2D, 360° video, Spatial Video, frame-packed 3D movies, and regular flat video.
No. AirStream works entirely on its own — your Mac, your folder, your headset. Plex simply gives you a nicer front door if you already use it: posters, titles, and where you left off.
Side-by-side 3D — the common kind.
A converted film is a new file alongside your original, and AirStream keeps a streaming cache so it starts instantly — so allow roughly twice the film's size. The app shows you exactly how much cache it's using and clears it in one click, and it offers to move the original to the Trash once a lossless conversion succeeds.