M2TS from Canon HG10 and Panasonic HDC-SD9
 

I got .m2ts files on my hard drive recorded from these 2 camcorders. I installed the ffdshow codec pack and I can play the HG10 .m2ts files properly using windows media player (just adding the deinterlace filter), When I try playing back the .m2ts generated from my Panasonic HDC-SD9, playback show way too many artifacts; although when I use the provided "HD Write" Software it plays just fine.

I am currently on Core 2 Quad hardware with 4 GB Ram, and nVidia 8600 video card.

What am I missing? Any ideas?

ffdshow is based on the ffmpeg libavcodec, and this codec still has some issues with AVCHD files, particularly the Panasonic ones. I have the same problem using ffplay on Linux - I can use it to get a crude preview of the mts files, but the quality is not good especially for Panasonic 1080/60i files. The Pana 1080/24P files seem to play better.

This situation will likely improve, but on Windows, you might be better off using the Panasonic software to view the files for now.

Thank you. I will try with 24p. In any case, its a bummer that at this point not any other "free" software can play back M2TS files created by Panasonic.

I agree, but to be fair, the libavcodec-based players (at least ffplay) don't even play Canon files perfectly - they don't have as much trouble as with the Panasonic 60i files, but I occasionally still see minor break-ups and pauses.

This seems to be the year of AVCHD really ramping up in popularity, so I suspect support for it will get a lot better among both open source and proprietary tools over the year.