The Adobe web site specific to Encore states:

"Publish content from AVCHD cameras to Blu-ray using the high-quality native camera format. By passing AVCHD content directly to disc without transcoding, Encore preserves the original fidelity of the source content."

I can't find a more in depth explanation of what this is saying. Does this refer to archival or can the native camera format be played on a Blu-ray player?

Can anyone explain?

Does this refer to archival or can the native camera format be played on a Blu-ray player?

AVCHD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCHD) is based on, and is designed to be compatible with, the blu-ray format. For many (most?) intents and purposes, AVCHD can be thought of as the native format of blu-ray disks. Often this means that there's no requirement to transcode your AVCHD footage when authoring a blu-ray disk. At least that's my non-expert take on it.

But can the native camera format be played on a blu-ray player? As in, can you drag-'n-drop an AVCHD file to a blu-ray disk and it'll just work? I doubt that seriously. Never tried it, but my understanding is that there's (considerably) more to authoring a blu-ray than just copying the AVCHD files. The players expect to find certain files in certain pre-defined places on the BD, so it's not as easy as drag-'n-drop.

I believe the web site quote refers to the idea that you can import your raw AVCHD clips directly into Encore as assets, place them on the Encore project timeline and burn the project to BR disk without Encore needing to transcode or render the original footage