VR clips play in a headset, and the preview is free. You do not need to buy anything to find out whether you like it: every VR clip on this site has a free VR teaser you can watch in your headset first. If you have no headset, nothing changes for you — VR clips also play as normal flat video, everywhere on the site.
Got a VR headset? Everything you can do on the site — browse, buy, watch, tip, comment, watch together, hear a premiere host — you can do inside the headset in the VR Hub, our own room for headsets. That article walks through it button by button.
1. What a VR clip is here, in one minute
A VR clip is filmed with a camera that has two lenses, about as far apart as your eyes. You get a picture that surrounds the front half of your view and has real depth — the performer is a distance away from you, not a flat image on a wall.
Everything sold here as VR is VR180, side-by-side. That is the format almost every VR site and every consumer VR camera uses. You never have to choose a setting for it: the player reads it from us automatically.
Two things worth knowing before you spend anything:
- The free teaser is a real test. It is the same camera, same format, same quality ladder as the full clip. If the teaser looks good in your headset, the clip will too.
- You are not locked into a headset. A VR clip you buy is also playable as ordinary flat video in your library, on a phone, a laptop or a TV.
2. What you need
| You have | What to do |
|---|---|
| A standalone headset (Meta Quest, PICO, Vision Pro) | Install DeoVR from the headset’s own store. It is free. |
| A PC headset (Index, Vive, WMR) | DeoVR on Steam, also free. |
| No headset | Nothing. VR clips play flat like any other clip. |
We recommend DeoVR because it is free, it is on every store, and it opens links from a website directly. If you already own HereSphere, that works too — it reads exactly the same link from us. We do not sell either app and we get nothing from them.
Do not expect a downloaded file to work in every player. Apps like SKYBOX play files you have already downloaded, but they cannot open a stream from a website. If you use one of those, download the clip first from your library.
3. Watching the free preview — step by step
- Put the headset on and open DeoVR.
- Inside DeoVR, open its built-in browser and go to this site. (Typing the address in the headset is easier if you are already logged in on that headset’s browser.)
- Open any clip that shows the orange VR badge.
- Press Watch preview in VR.
- DeoVR takes over and plays the teaser. Look around — the picture follows your head.
That is the whole test, and it costs nothing.
4. Watching a clip you bought
- Buy the clip as usual, on the site or in the headset browser.
- Go to My Account → My Library.
- On a VR clip you will see two buttons: Play (flat, as always) and Watch in VR.
- Press Watch in VR. DeoVR opens and starts the full clip.
The VR link is valid for a short time after you press it. If you come back hours later, just press the button again — it makes a new one. There is no limit on how often you can do that, and no limit on how often you can re-download a clip you own.
5. If the picture is not right
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Two small pictures side by side, like a squashed pair | You are watching in a flat player, not in VR. Use Watch in VR, or in DeoVR set the format to 180° side-by-side. |
| Depth feels inside-out, things that should be near feel far | The player has the eyes swapped. Switch left/right eye in the player’s settings. |
| Soft or blocky picture that does not sharpen | Two possible reasons. First, your connection: the player starts low and climbs, so give it ten seconds. Second, DeoVR limits quality when you are not signed in to DeoVR itself — a free DeoVR account lifts that. Signing in costs nothing and is unrelated to your account here. |
| It stutters at the highest quality | Pick a lower quality in the player. 6K is close to 8K in a headset and much easier to decode. |
| Nothing happens when you press the button | DeoVR is not installed, or you pressed it in a normal browser instead of inside DeoVR’s browser. |
6. Comfort
If you are new to VR, watch sitting down the first few times, and stop when you have had enough rather than pushing through. VR180 is much gentler than 360° video because the picture does not move when you do not move — but a headset is still new to your balance, and there is no prize for enduring it.
7. Honest limitations
- The free DeoVR account. DeoVR caps playback quality for users who are not signed in to DeoVR. That is their rule, not ours, and we cannot lift it from our side.
- Not every clip is VR. Only clips with the orange VR badge. Use the Format filter on the clips page to see only VR — or to hide it, if you do not have a headset.
- Phone “cardboard” viewers. These work in principle but the picture is far below what a real headset shows. We do not recommend judging a clip by one.
8. Using a player other than DeoVR
Nothing here is locked to one app. A VR clip you bought is an ordinary VR180 side-by-side
file, and every VR player worth using can open one. The Watch in VR button is a
convenience for DeoVR, not a requirement — if you prefer another player, use
Download in your library and open the file wherever you like.
What we have actually tested
We separate these on purpose, because “should work” and “we checked” are not the same thing
and you deserve to know which one you are getting.
| Route | Where | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Straight in the browser, no app | Any modern browser, including the Quest browser | Tested by us. Drag with the mouse or your finger to look around. |
| DeoVR — the Watch in VR button | Quest / Pico standalone, and PCVR via Steam | Built and wired by us. One press hands the clip to DeoVR. |
| Any other player, via Download | HereSphere, SKYBOX, PLAY’A, Pigasus, Whirligig, VLC… | Works because the file is a standard VR180 SBS MP4. We have not certified each app individually — if one of them refuses a file of ours, tell us and we will look at it. |
The players people actually use
- DeoVR — free. Quest, Pico, and on Steam for PC headsets. The one our button
talks to directly. - HereSphere — paid. On Steam and for Quest. Well liked for its picture
controls and the amount of tuning it allows. - SKYBOX VR — free with a paid tier. Quest and Steam. Happily plays a
downloaded file, and can also pull from a PC over your home network. - PLAY’A VR — free. Quest, Steam, phones. Has its own built-in browser.
- Pigasus — paid, Quest. Strong at playing files straight off the headset or a
network share. - Whirligig — on Steam, a long-standing favourite for PC headsets.
- Virtual Desktop — Quest. Not a video player as such: it puts your PC screen
in the headset, so anything that plays on the PC plays in VR.
Telling a player what it is looking at
Some players guess the format from the filename and get it right. If a player opens your clip
and the picture looks doubled, squashed, or flat, it has guessed wrong — set it by hand:
- Projection / format: VR180 (some apps call this “180°” or “half sphere”)
- Stereo / 3D layout: Side-by-side (SBS), left eye on the left
That is the whole answer. Two settings, and it looks right.
On Steam
If you use a PC headset — Valve Index, Vive, Reverb, or a Quest over Link or Virtual Desktop —
DeoVR, HereSphere, SKYBOX, PLAY’A and Whirligig are all on Steam. Install any of them, then open a
clip you downloaded. On PC, DeoVR needs a free extension from the Microsoft Store before it will
play our AV1 version; if you would rather not install anything extra, the HEVC version plays without
it, and DeoVR picks whichever it can use on its own.
One honest note about 8K
An 8K clip is 8K in a headset. In a browser you may be served a lower rung: browsers refuse
some codecs outright, and the clip has to arrive in one they will actually decode. We ship an AV1
version specifically so that modern browsers can play the full 8K, and an HEVC version so that
headsets — including a Quest 2, which has no AV1 decoder — get 8K as well. The quality menu in the
player shows you what is really being served, rather than what we would like to claim.
9. No headset? Your phone in a cardboard holder
You do not need a Quest to watch these in 3D. A phone and one of those simple holders — the
folded cardboard kind, or a plastic one with a strap — is enough, and the clip you bought already
contains everything needed for it.
How
- Open the clip page on your phone.
- Press play, then press the goggles button in the player bar.
- The picture splits into two, the phone locks to landscape and the screen stays awake.
- Slide the phone into the holder. Look around by turning your head.
- Tap the screen to come back out.
Why this is real 3D and not a trick
A VR180 clip is filmed with two lenses and stored as two pictures side by side — one per eye.
Ordinary playback throws one of them away. In this mode we draw both: your left eye gets the left
picture, your right eye the right one. That is the same stereo pair a headset shows, which is why
things genuinely sit at different distances from you rather than looking like a curved poster.
What to expect, honestly
- Sharpness is limited by your phone, not by the clip. Half a phone screen per
eye is far fewer pixels than a headset, so an 8K clip will not look 8K here. It will still look
good, and the depth is real. - We do not apply lens correction. Every holder’s lenses are shaped slightly
differently, and a correction aimed at the wrong lens looks worse than none at all. What you get
is a clean stereo pair, which is what these holders are built to display. - Head tracking uses the phone’s motion sensor. Turning works; walking around
does not — there is nothing in the clip to walk to. That is true of every VR180 video anywhere. - Use headphones. Sound placement does a surprising amount of the work.
If it does not look right
If the two halves seem swapped or your eyes struggle to merge them, the holder is probably
sitting too far from or too close to your face — most have an adjustment for that. If the picture
is doubled rather than split, you are looking at the ordinary player: press the goggles button
first.
10. Live streams in VR180 — from the live room into your headset
Some creators stream live in VR180 3D. Their live page (/live/name/) works like any other live room — chat, tips and private shows are all there — plus two things you will not see on a flat stream.
Look around, no headset needed. Under the player there is a Look around switch. Drag the picture with your mouse or finger, or on a phone just move the phone, and you look around the creator’s room. This is a flat, one-eye view — you get the room, not the depth.
Watch in VR. Next to Private Show there is a Watch in VR button. Open the same live page in the browser inside your VR headset and press it: it takes you straight into the VR Hub and opens this stream in 3D around you, with the live chat and tips in front of you. On a computer or an ordinary phone the button cannot do that, so it tells you the two ways instead — open the page in your headset, or keep using Look around.
You can also start from the VR Hub itself: every running VR180 stream is on its Live shelf.
Finding them on /live. On the /live overview every running VR180 show carries a VR180 · 3D badge in the corner of its card and counts in the VR segment, so you can spot it before you put the headset on.
Which devices work
- Meta Quest 2 / 3 / Pro — yes, in the headset’s own browser. This is what we test on.
- Pico, Apple Vision Pro — their browsers support the same web standard (WebXR), so it should work the same way; we have not tested these ourselves yet.
- Computer, phone or tablet — Look around only (flat, no 3D).
- Phone in a cardboard holder — not yet for live streams. The split-screen goggles mode from section 9 exists for clips only for now.
- DeoVR and other VR video apps — not yet for live streams. They play our VR clips, but a live stream reaches your headset through the browser, not through those apps.
Tips. Put the headset on first, sign in there, then open the live page — the button only appears while the creator is actually streaming in VR180. Use 5 GHz Wi-Fi if you can: the stream is 4K. Sound, chat and tips work in the headset exactly as on the live page.
