Hello,

I just figured I'd share some of the research I did to get clean HD content off of my camcorder. I did a writeup at my blog, the url is:

http://blog.tmm.cx/2009/09/21/avchd-and-free-software/

I hope it'll be useful for someone else too!

As far as your PC not being fast enough to play the full-sized AVCHD, if you have newer Nvidia card you can try mplayer or xine with vdpau which offloads the H.264 decoding and deinterlacing to the video hardware. On my PC it uses just 3% CPU to play full 1080i footage (including deinterlacing) but almost 100% to play without vdpau.

TMM: you can transcode AVCHD files in Kdenlive (no quality loss, but huge files)

stlpaul: if have yet to successfully install the support for VDPAU. can you give me a link for a working solution?

VDPAU is only available in the non-free nVidia drivers, and advertising it's use isn't generally a good idea I think.

As for reencoding to 'huge files' that is exactly what my blogpost does :) it reencodes the MTS files to 'ljpeg' ljpeg libavcodec's name for lossless motion jpeg. In combination with the MKV container it makes for really smooth editing. The MTS and AVI containers really aren't suitable for non-linear editing to begin with.

I appreciate your effort, but why not leave files in full HD? Every pixel of detail counts, maybe not right not, but most certainly in the future.

My own movies will almost all go to the Internet and right now, I don't have the space to have the movies in 1080p AND lossless on my computer. However the commands I list will still work fine if you chose not to resize to 720p :) if you just use the yadif and harddup filters you will end up with 1080p25 or 1080p30 (depending on your camera) movies that will probably also be easy enough to decode and edit! :)

I also save all the original recordings in MTS format, so if I ever want to change over I should be able to upgrade the clips and just rerender. Theoretically, anyway :)

TMM:

Could you please post the entire command line referenced on your blog. I'm unable to produce anything except a silent, no video file.
tia

I'm not TMM, but here's the line:

mencoder -of lavf -demuxer lavf -vf yadif,scale=1280:720,harddup -oac pcm -ofps 25 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=ljpeg /media/CANON/avchd/bdmv/stream/00000.mts -o 00000.mkv

broken up for readability:

mencoder -of lavf -demuxer lavf -vf yadif,scale=1280:720,harddup \
-oac pcm -ofps 25 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=ljpeg \
/media/CANON/avchd/bdmv/stream/00000.mts -o 00000.mkv

(I'm not getting previews, so I apologize if the following is a garbled mess)

Or with commentary:

mencoder -of lavf # output container format, other options include avi, mpeg lavg
-demuxer lavf # Force demuxer - use `mplayer -demuxer help` to discover choices
-vf yadif,scale=1280:720,harddup # Video Filter yadif is a deinterlacing filter,
# scale enforces a target resolution
# harddup mandates writing of duplicate frames
-oac pcm # output Audio codec, PCM is a lossless variety
-ofps 25 # output frames per second, if you have an NTSC based camera set to 30 (or 60?)
-ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=ljpeg # output video codec many choices, see the man page
# vcodec specifies lossless jpeg
/media/CANON/avchd/bdmv/stream/00000.mts # input file name, change to fit working environment
-o 00000.mkv # output file name, change to fit the working environment