Sorry if this has been posted before. It took me several hours to find out the following:
(does this forum have a search function?)

Starting from an AVCHD clip (.mts taken from a panasonic SD20 camera), the raw .mts file can be viewed without problem
(albeit too slowly).

If I insert an .mts clip in the project, then ask kdenlive to transcode or render it to , the result is unusable (audio is ok, video is messed up with either huge flicker or completely black images).

If on the other hand, I first ask to "split audio", then render to (without even ungrouping the clips), the end result looks very acceptable.

This is with latest svn versions of ffmpeg and kdenlive, and with latest git version of mlt.

ffmpeg - r19431

mlt - commit bf234cd08ba376f2157d3bd2dd0fc8f0c5e605e2
Author: Dan Dennedy
Date: Tue Jul 14 11:39:33 2009 -0700

Add missing include for basename().

kdenlive - r3730

Presumably this is not expected behaviour. Have other people experienced this?

oops some parts of the text were interpreted as tags and left out...
it should read twice "render to ...insert your favourite format here ..."

When you say "transcode" do you mean the proper Kdenlive Transcode (e.g., to DNxHD) feature and not Render?