Dear friends,

On 18 September, Jeff Downs submitted a patch on ffmpeg mailing list to support interlaced encoding. I guess it means that AVCHD support should be there in a few moments (days?). An ffmpeg user tested with success on Sony HDR-SR1. It means that Kdenlive/MLT should support AVCHD soon.

I am delighted.

Kind regards,

Jean-Michel

I've been looking foward to this! :D

The power of free software.

It is really great to use a video editing tool based

on the work of thousands of developers!

AVCHD committed to ffmpeg CVS.

Anyone testing?

Some preliminary patches have been committed, but the main PAFF support is not there yet.

Stay tuned.

seems like AVCHD was committed and is now enabled by default. It is high time for testing...

I just built kdenlive with the latest SVN of ffmpeg (and everything else) and gave it a try.

Bits of it work, but not everything and some things are very slow.

e.g. I drag a clip to the timeline and it takes quite a while to appear. If I turn off video thumbnails, this delay goes away.

So I think it is taking a long time to get the thumbnail of the final frame - as though it is decoding the whole

video rather than seeking to the end.

There are other problems that appear to be 'seek' related. e.g. I created a transition between two clips and it

displays OK (though slowly). But when I move the pointer back into the first clip, I always see the final frame.

Even once we get all the bugs out, I think you will need a high-end CPU to be able to work comfortably with AVCHD.

My 2GHz Core2 only just keeps up if I'm lucky. There is work happening to parallelise some of the decoding so

that a dual-core can be put to good use. But even if that works perfectly, rendering a transition will require decoding

two streams at once so you will be back to "just barely keeping up"

I suspect that it will still be best to convert to a less CPU-intensive format for general working with HD Video for a while yet.

Thanks for your report, I saw your patches on ffmpeg mailing list.

I don't really care to see transitions, I prefer very good quality sources.

When exporting, you can downgrade to a less extensive format.

I thought h264 decoding was multithreaded recently.

Am I wrong? Not in the case of AVCHD?

Kind regards,

Jean-Michel

After asking on ffmpeg mailing list, ffmpeg allow AVCHD multi-threaded decoding.

ffmpeg needs to be compiled with --enable-pthreads

Then, MLT must support threads.