I used Sony Motion Picture Browser and burn an AVCHD disk on a regular Sony DVD-R. I went to Best Buy and inserted the disc into the BDP-S300 player. It played!!!

However, the bad part is that for every new clip, it stopped for a few seconds before playing the next one. What's the deal? When I played in the camcorder, SR1, it played very smooth from one clip to the next.

Is there something wrong with the Sony Motion Picture Browser that didn't burn the disc correctly?

Unfortunately, that is the way it makes DVD's. The new Sony Vegas Pro 8 will let you create a movie from your AVCHD and render it in Sony AVC format, then you can use Picture Motion Browser to make the AVCHD DVD.

Download the 30 day trial and test it out, it should allow you to make seamless AVCHD DVD's. Of course the software cost is a lot more $$$ than the (free) Picture Motion Browser, but at least is has a reasonable name.

Vegas 8 will encode as you have said but will take about 10 times realtime ( at least on my AMD X2 4200 dual core). Making AVC disc with menus is not straight forward and certainly not fast at the moment. I have just bought a Blackmagic Intensity card and will experiment capturing from my SR7 through HDMI. I think it will be a lot faster in the end. Both Vegas and Edius can use the Blackmagic MJPEG coded file though it is big at about 49G per hour. I will report how these files encode to SD DVD or out to HDV tape etc when I have done a few tests.

Ron Evans

I had the Pentium 4 3.0 GHz non-HT and it took two days and two nights for 2 hours of rendering. It crapped out at the end.

I just tried it with my new pc, Q6600, and it worked in one hour.