AVCHD Player for Mac OS X?

[Roger Garcia]

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.

[Zack Andrews]

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

[Brian Parker]

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.

[Steve Mullen]

Originally Posted by Brian Parker

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.

[Marcelo Lima]

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!!!

[Murad Toor]

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[Gregory Stoner]

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.

[Drew Wallner]

Originally Posted by Gregory Stoner

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.

[Larry Horwitz]

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

[Randy Painter]

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.

[Larry Horwitz]

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.

[Pavel Houda]

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

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.

[Nick Gordon]

Originally Posted by Larry Horwitz

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

[Larry Horwitz]

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

[Stu Holmes]

Originally Posted by Larry Horwitz

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?