Does anyone know of a way to play AVCHD .MTS files on Mac OS X, such as files straight from the HF100? The following link seems to suggest Flash Player 9.3 will play .MTS files, but I have yet to figure out how to do it. Any ideas?

I know the nightly builds of VLC is suppose to do it, but when trying this on my MacBook the video is very choppy and then VLC crashes after about 5 seconds. Thanks!

AVCHD straight to Flash Player 9.3 demo (Flash Rocks)
http://www.crafted.com.au/blog/2008/01/11/avchd-straight-to-flash-player-93-demo-flash-rocks/

You've just discovered one the joys of AVCHD -- no Mac players and only one PC player. And, none of them will really play video unless you have AT LEAST a 2.66GHz QUAD core computer. Think Mac Pro with 8 cores.

Just to clarify a bit....

AVCHD will play on the PC with several players I have owned and used,including the free DiVX player. Some of the other AVCHD players are Nero's Show Time, ArcSoft's Total Media Theater, Cyberlink's PowerDVD 7 HD versions, Corel's WIN DVD 9 Plus BluRay, as well as all of the authoring programs for AVCHD on the PC, which number 7 I can immediately think of. That makes at least a dozen in total!

The Mac is vastly less versatile / capable when playing AVCHD content from the camcorder, although I do find it very competent for HDV.

Larry

He was asking about OS X.

Also, you are counting DVD Players which, in their HD versions, are not free or even cheap. And, it's not obvious to a new camcorder buyer than DIVX has anything to with AVCHD. I think of DIVX only in the context of ripping (stealing) SD DVDs since MPEG-2, AVC, and VC-1 are what the industry uses.

Most people expect to play their media with either a QT Player or WM Player.

But, thank you for the tip on the DIVX. I'll have to see if the DIVX player that's on my Mac can play AVCHD -- although unless I had a MacPro it won't really play.

I know he was asking about OS-X Steve, but your comment that there "is only one PC player" for AVCHD is really quite wrong. I agree that some of this PC software is indeed a bit expensive, but the very best of them on the PC (in my opinion) is Nero Show Time which comes with an entire suite of really useful software including disk burning, AVCHD disk creation and editing, and other things and is available for $69. None of the other programs is much more than $79 with the exception of Pinnacle 12 Ultimate, which now sells for a bit over $100 but has a $30 rebate.

My point with all of this is that AVCHD is fully represented on the PC with a total of 13 ways to play it, 8 ways to author and edit it, and at least 5 more ways to convert it:

1.DiVX Player
2.Nero Show Time
3.Arcsoft Total Media Theater
4.PowerDVD
5.WinDVD
6.Sony Vegas 8 Pro
7.Magix Movie Edit Pro Plus V14
8.Ulead / Corel VideoStudio 11.5
9.Ulead Corel Movie Factory 6 Plus
10.Cyberlink PowerDirector 7 Ultra
11.Nero Vision 5
12.Pinnacle Studio 12 Ultimate
13.ArcSoft Total Media Studio HD

There are also a number of PC programs which simply convert AVCHD into other formats for easier editing, including such programs as:

1.Vaast Upshift
2.Voltaic
3.Elecard AVCHD Converter
4.TMPGE Express
5.Mainconcepts h.2664 encoder

and others.

I have absolutely no desire to spark any Mac versus PC thread or discussion here, but I do want to make it clear that the PC has a really extensive AVCHD set of tools, and my personal mnigration from doing nearly 5 years of HDV editing is now entirely replaced for AVCHD with very smooth and rapid workflow PC software, substantially better and much faster than HDV ever was. Despite owning a 4 core and then an 8 core MacPro, I was never able to find anything remotely equal in performance on the Mac for AVCHD, given the very limited software choices of Final Cut or iMovie.

Larry

Thanks, guys, for the information and discussion on this. This AVCHD format is reminding me of things like FireWire - great technologies buried alive by the licensors.

Though it never had a Mac OS X product, several months ago I came accress Mirillis.com who had a simple app called Oxygen AVCHD Player. Now, if you go to that site you will see that the AVCHD cops took it down. What a shame. Does this mean VLC will be killed when version 9 comes out with playback support for AVCHD?

But is not AVCHD h.264? And is not h.264 an open (free) standard? I'm confusued. Is AVCHD a free and open standard or not? I admit, I don't really know.

I'm not an attorney Zack but this may provide the answer to your question:

MPEG LA News Release (http://www.mpegla.com/news/n_03-11-17_avc.html)

But is not AVCHD h.264? And is not h.264 an open (free) standard? I'm confusued. Is AVCHD a free and open standard or not? I admit, I don't really know.

AVC/H.264 is part of MPEG-4 which owned by the MPEG group. You can't, they claim, have an AVC encoder/decoder without a license.

Sony and Pana took a license for AVC, locked certain parameters, and now had a product they could license to others. It's not clear if they only license the NAME. It might be legal to have an AVC codec that used exactly those parameters as long as you called it something else, e.g., AVCPIX.

Note there are two versions of AVCHD: one uses the less powerful BASE profile (Sony) and the other the MAIN profile (Canon and Pana). Which I suspect reflects Sony's desire to keep AVCHD restricted to consumer camcorders.

PS: I claim codecs are math and one can NOT patent an equation. Think of human development if Sum, Chi Square, Mean, Standard Deviation, FFT, etc. had been able to be receive a patent. You would need a license to balance your checkbook. I believe you can only steal an implementation: code, circuit, etc.) So I expect you will see VLC with a AVCHD decoding even if it isn't called AVCHD.

the only app i've found that will recognize m2t files is elgato's turbo.264, the downside being it's made to only work with the turbo.264 hardware encoder (usb dongle) and when you export you can only export to 900x600 or something close to that.

that aside, any of yall who do a lot of encoding on slower macs might want to check it out.

elgato.com

Does the Mac version of the DiVX player open and play AVCHD?

I will be checking this week. But, unless you have a MacPro -- your playback will be very poor.

I agree entirely Steve. As I said a few posts earlier in this thread:

"Despite owning a 4 core and then an 8 core MacPro, I was never able to find anything remotely equal in performance on the Mac for AVCHD, given the very limited software choices of Final Cut or iMovie."

I no longer have any MacPros here, having been through the AVCHD issues (and also dealing with Parallels, Bootcamp, and related Mac problems when running Windows) but I was impressed with how well DiVX played so I am guessing that perhaps AVCHD may possibly work well also with their codec, and then again it may not.

On the editing front: From brief testing with Canon files, using Final Cut Log & Transfer to ingest AVCHD and convert to ProRes is pretty painless -- as long as you have an Intel Mac, FCP 6.02 or better, and lots of disk space.

On the editing front: From brief testing with Canon files, using Final Cut Log & Transfer to ingest AVCHD and convert to ProRes is pretty painless -- as long as you have an Intel Mac, FCP 6.02 or better, and lots of disk space.

chuck,

I have Casıo F1 files. its codec is H.264 and extension is .mov but I couldn't ingest with "log and transfer " with final cut. When I try to drag the media to transfer window, it says "media is not supported..."

As far as know H.264 is apple codec, but we couldn't use or play it ?

thanks
alkım.

you need a newer intel based mac
the problem is you cant make a hd dvd with mac
but it plays fine

I use Roxio's Toast Titanium 9 with my Mac Pro with the HD plug in (a must for this type of viewing/conversion). It has a video player and you can open .mts files which say, you have copied from your memory stick to a hard drive. It can also convert those mts files to quicktime movies. I have not done a real time test on the conversions, but it seems as fast as if not faster than iMovie.

VLC 9.2 is out and successfully played my HF100's .MTS files on my Windows XP machine at work. I'm looking forward to trying it on my MacBook when I get home tonight!

http://www.videolan.org

I have a mac pro and hf11. I used iMovie to import the files (the first time I've ever opened that software. Shame on canon for not having a simple ingest program for the mac). They now playback fine on this computer. I have 2 questions though:

1) Is iMovie just re-wrapping the m2ts files into movs? It's not doing any re-encoding is it? I made sure to import at FullHD settings.

2) Is there a way to get the files to playback in Vista, maybe through directshow, without installing any of that Canon software? Ideally I'd like to be able to play the files in something like Zoomplayer or jRiver's Media Center. I tried selecting ffdshow video decoder and haali media splitter as the filters for playback but i only got sound with no picture.

1) Is iMovie just re-wrapping the m2ts files into movs? It's not doing any re-encoding is it? I made sure to import at FullHD settings.


iMovie 08 converts to AIC so editing can be TOTALLY (EVERY FX) real-time. This is the same as FCE and FCP. Although with FCP you get the option to transcode to ProRes 422. Again, the goal is to get multi-stream real-time editing. (Like 4 to 7 streams at the same time like you can do with HDV.)

iMovie 6 -- last I looked, did not support AVCHD.

PS: the issue isn't simply getting the AVCHD codec supported -- it's that the vast vast majority of the installed base is still not Intel. And, unless you have a Mac Pro, you likely don't have the compute power to playback perfectly.

I have an MAC BOOK PRO 2.4 Core 2 Duo, Toast 9 with HD plug-in and the videos 1980x1080 17 Mbits (from Canon HG21) is choppy.. Not good... What is wrong? In my Core quad q6600 with pixela software or nero i can watch the movie and the cpu usage very low and highest video quality... Why i cant watch my avchd movies with quality on my mbp?

And about iMovie? I cant import the files... (mts from stream folder...)

Please, name one good software to simply watch... In pc i hadnt this problem.. Came with the camera, a PIXELA IMAGEMIXER 3 and i can watch, and even burn avchd wihtout transcoding and watch the disc on PLAYSTATION 3. But in Apple, its HARD WORK!!!

__________

Capturing from a Panasonic HDC-HS300 via USB I am logging

What I found on the current gen MacBook Pro was internal hard drive was limiting playback performance. I ended up setting up a external eSATA Raid to see if this would help fix the bottleneck. Fry's had a special on Spinpoints 1Gig drive the other day( $86).

In went four Samsung F1 Spinpoint 1 gig HD drives in a Trans International MiniG 4 Drive eSata case connected it to a FirmTek SeriTek 2SM2-E eSata Express card. Then I set the four drive in SW Raid 0 mode via Disk Utility. I am now getting stutter less real-time playback from clips import at 1900 x 1080 with iMovie 09. Plus seeing better then real-time scubbing speed.

What I found on the current gen MacBook Pro was internal hard drive was limiting playback performance.

Glad to hear that, I just ordered some new hard drives for my Mac Pro and perhaps that will help with my playback. I see stuttered performance in both Toast Video Player and VLC if I try to play my MTS streams directly. Odd thing is, on the exact same hardware, I can watch my clips smoothly in iMovie's "camera" preview while my disc images are mounted.

I wish there was some way to access AVCHD clips on a Mac and play them back like iMovie does, without having to deal with the limitations of launching iMovie and pretending a camera is attached. Obviously the code is there within my Mac to do it and my hardware can hack it, so it's frustrating to not have better access to that functionality.

AVCHD on the Mac, even the recent Intel multicore Macs, is a weak alternative, and most users resort to transcoding to another format or running PC software under Bootcamp / Parallels. Powermac users are far worse off and can't really handle AVCHD at all.

Authoring of AVCHD disks is also a big problem, and BluRay support also is very weak. (The newest Final Cut finally allows it as of last week's update if you have another grand to spend.....)

As my prior posts in this thread describe, the Mac user has a comparatively weak and limited variety of choices.

Larry

Most software makers are not taking advantage of all the cores like handbrake does. When snow leopard comes out in september, we should see improvements. But, since maybe 5 out of 100 people I know have blue ray players, and maybe a third out of 100 have upconvert dvd players, I'll keep transcoding to AIC so all of them can watch my video's. Doesn't make sense to invest into software that won't get your return on the investment. If you have allot of clients that will pay more for HD, then its worth all the steps, frustrations to use a windows machine.

Seems very unfortunate that people who have purchased AVCHD camcorders, MacPros, and high def TV sets can't create any distribution to view, archive, or share HD content without spending yet another 2 grand for Final Cut and external BluRay burner.

All Playstations 3 and most BluRay player owners can enjoy HD disk playback from AVCHD disks made with PCs and $45 software using standard (non BluRay) DVDs. iMovie 09 and iDVD 09 should have included this capability IMHO.

Toast 10 allows to burn AVCHD, Mac edited video's on DVDs, DL-DVD's and BD's. Not perfect, not free, but not 2k either. Some people do wedding video's that way as well. Not perfect menus, no chapter handling but there are work-arounds.

burn blu ray movie from imovie 08 - Roxio Community (http://forums.support.roxio.com/index.php?showtopic=53245&st=0&p=276724&#entry276724)

For personal use I generate the AVC streams in Toast, load them on NAS disc and stream them at 1920x1080 on PS-3 (looks as good as any BD I've seen), together with lot of other multi-media locally as well as from the web. There is no perfect solution for BD-5 and BD-9 even under DVD Architect. There are always workarounds, but the Blu-ray consortia can always disable some features, so general distribution would be difficult.

Seems very unfortunate that people who have purchased AVCHD camcorders, MacPros, and high def TV sets can't create any distribution to view, archive, or share HD content without spending yet another 2 grand for Final Cut and external BluRay burner.

All Playstations 3 and most BluRay player owners can enjoy HD disk playback from AVCHD disks made with PCs and $45 software using standard (non BluRay) DVDs. iMovie 09 and iDVD 09 should have included this capability IMHO.

Tell Steve J. He very explicitly said (last Autumn) that he thought disk-based distribution was so on the wane that it wasn't worthwhile to fit BR drives to Macs. I guess he sees you getting your HD output to your HD TV via Apple TV or similar

The Toast 10 disks I have burned play on the Playstation 3, but do not play on either of my 2 set-top BluRay players, despite claiming to be AVCHD-compliant. Many other AVCHDs from 4 other (PC-based) authoring programs play on these same players, so I have serious reservations about these Roxio disks.

Steve Jobs has publicly treated the HD / BluRay trend in a very dismissive manner, quite possibly due to the inability of Apple to reach a succesful DRM arrangement with the BluRay consortium. In his typical hubris, he denies the viability of the technology itself, saying that Apple does not consider it worthwhile.

I may sound like an Apple basher, but I will re-state here that I have had a total of 19 Macs, starting with the "fat Mac 512K machine" in 1984 and, most recently an 8 core Mac Pro, and most everything in betwen, so I am a huge fan, but I sincerely feel that Apple has totally and entirely missed the market when it comes to high def, AVCHD, BluRay, and the like. All of the very latest Macs and monitors, for example, have yet to incorporate HDCP, thus preventing commercial content from being shown entirely.

I have seen so many people buy AVCHD camcorders only to discover that the Mac is a very limited platform for doing simple native editing and high def disk authoring.

It is really so unfortunate since DVD Studio Pro is a great disk authoring program and iMovie and iDVD should and could incorporate the needed codecs and tools if Apple chose to provide them.

Apple has far too much of an agenda when they formed an AppleTV-centric universe, with the presumption that Apple computer owners would use the Apple TV as their sole media hub.


Larry

I have seen so many people buy AVCHD camcorders only to discover that the Mac is a very limited platform for doing simple native editing and high def disk authoring.
hi Larry - I have read similar comments from other people too. But my question is (pardon me if i've missed something here) is IF you do have an AVCHD cam, and use something like Cineform Neoscene to convert the AVCHD footage to an intra-frame format AVI, then surely this editing AVCHD on a Mac problem goes away?

Not ideal i know, and creates v big files, but am i correct in making tha above statement?

Yes, after transcoding, it's fine.

This may be completely obvious, but if you just need to view the clips in a hurry to see what you've got, you can playback the clips in iMovie's capture window, or FCP's Log and Transfer window. Since I have my macbook pro plugged into 32 inch screen, I get a decent sized viewing, and it occasionally satisfies someone looking over my shoulder who has to immediately see what we shot...

Hello Stu H and Stuart H (quite a coincidence!)

Yes, transcoding to another format will provide a solution, but I hesitate to suggest it since it adds a lot of time to make the conversion, compromises the quality of the original image since decompression followed by recompression takes place, and results in very large files as well.

The AVCHD format with 1920 by 1080 resolution is intrinsically handled well by the faster Intel processors, and therefore some Intel-based Macs can now handle the workload. It is merely a matter of Mac software catching up to the PC world in terms of handling native AVCHD.

Since I personally like to author my HD disks in AVC (h.264) format, either as BluRay or AVCHD, I personally dislike the approach of converting AVCHD to another format, then editing it, and then converting back into h.264. It wastes enormous time, degrades the image, and is entirely an accomodation to a very immature software and BluRay authoring environment further confounded by Apple's insistence that QuickTime wrappers be used in their programs.

Larry

So, I know this is painful but I just want to get this straight for Mac users . . .

1) If you have a MacPro, FCP 7 and Clipwrap you should be AOK to work with AVCHD?

2) You could maybe (?) import these same 1920x1080 "Clip Wrapped" movies into Avid as DNxHD files?

I use both platforms for different purposes and am looking at getting a Canon AVCHD camera for personal use and just want to be sure that this path will work.

Many thanks :-)

Here's clarification for AVCHD on Mac.

Clipwrap can only do HDV files (MPEG-2), not AVCHD's MTS (or M2TS) ones. So, right now, Clipwrap won't help you much with editing AVCHD files directly. However, last week, I heard from some beta testers of Version 2, which is supposed to rewrap AVCHD into QuickTime, for transparent native editing on Mac. Right now, it's not out yet; when it does come, it will be an intriguing option.

On Mac, currently, there is only one software platform that can edit AVCHD natively: Adobe CS4 Production Premium (i.e. Premiere and AfterEffects). If you definitely want to edit native files, without ANY generational loss due to transcoding, that is your solution.

Other Mac solutions (such as iMovie, Final Cut Express, or Final Cut Pro) can recognise AVCHD camcorder and transcode AVCHD files into AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) or ProRes (FCP only).

I have tested both workflows (Premiere CS4, as well as FCP). The resulting image quality is perceptively identical, despite the generational loss due to transcoding with FCP. One major advantage of transcoding into ProRes is the 4:2:2 chroma sampling that it provides. If you need to do some colour correction, exposure correction or visual effects, ProRes will give you much more latitude and colour detail than original AVCHD. Unless you are only splicing uncorrected AVCHD files, transcoding into ProRes is a better solution.

Another major benefit of transcoding is the significantly less demand ProRes (or any other transcoded format) puts on your Mac. You will be able to have live rendering on significantly more effects with ProRes than with AVCHD. The only drawback will be the file sizes of those temporary ProRes files, which are 10-20 times larger than AVCHD (i.e. one hour of full HD video in ProRes takes up to 250GB of disk space).

One more thing to consider with the Mac workflow is Cineform's NeoScene. This utility transcodes AVCHD into Cineform codec (similar to ProRes), but its advantage is that it will remove 2:3 pulldown from 24p content that's wrapped into 60i. Since most consumer camcorders of today encode 24p in telecined 60i, removing the pulldown before transcoding into Cineform (or ProRes, or AIC) makes for easy 24p editing, on a proper 24p timeline.

Excellent advice Predrag, makes everything perfectly clear. Thankyou!

I guess I thought clip wrap was the magic bullet . . . and it may still be a big help in the future. I guess there's also the possibility that Snow Leopard could offer something in the future - maybe . . ? Wouldn't count on it though.

Do you know if AVCHD can be trans-coded into Avid DNxHD? That would be wonderful for me as I am more predisposed to Media Composer than FCP.

As a newby here I do want to offer my thanks to all the regular posters here. I've been an editor 30 years in the business and it's great to find so much knowledge and so many answers in one place. Thanks to you all.

Cheers

I'm using FCP 6.0.6 on an early 2008 OctoPro with 32GB RAM and I'm not seeing the AVCHD files in FCP Log and Transfer at all... To add to this frustration, I had to give the camera back so I created a disk image of the files and copied them from the Canon Camcorder internal memory to an internal hard disk on my Mac.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
Pete D.

???????????

Have you tried setting a custom path to your AVCHD directory? Open the Log and Transfer window and click the 'gear' icon at the top

Hi,
I have tried that method a few times.... I keep getting:

"AVCHD" contains unsupported media or has an invalid directory structure. Please choose a folder whose directory structure matches supported media.


..... and I don't know how to get around that!

B-(

Hmm.

AVCHD needs the video files and the directory structure to work. I can only assume that the structure has somehow been corrupted.

Try using MPEG Streamclip to convert the individual .mts files to ProRes422 for editing in FCP. It should work OK

Thanks... I'll give that a shot.. I've been out of town for days... will get back to work in a day or so

Thanks!
Pete D.