My family has a ton of photos, we all have digital cameras and are pretty liberal with their use. Most of our family videos are on DV tapes or even dreaded VHS… I should have them all converted over already but I have been slacking on that job. Recently my father purchased a high resolution video camera (Cannon HF100) which does 1080P video quite fantastically. However the camera creates its files in some format that was up until recently not able to be read by major media players like VLC and Totem.
The files are .mts which are also known as AVCHD (Advanced Video Codec High Definition) files. These are high-definition MPEG transport stream video used by Sony, Panasonic, Cannon and other HD camcorder manufactures. .mts is based on the MPEG-2 transport steam and supports 720p and 1080p video formats.
My family wanted to be able to view our files on our media center, which is currently running ubuntu and sometimes Boxee. I wanted to choose an open standard that would ensure the highest quality and best transportability for these files because we really only want to convert them once. For this I wanted to go ahead with the Matroska video container becuase it seems to be on the rise in popularity while it supports great compression using MPEG and x264, most players natively support it and many hardware based players are adding support for it every day.
Its Business Time:
I have seen some great ways to go about tackling this issue, most notably the post on fsckin w/ linux which is referenced below. I wanted to use a tool to do this rather than a script because I didn’t want to remove the power from other members of my family in choosing to encode their video’s with whatever settings they chose. I ended up deciding to use Handbrake because it has a great UI in windows and linux and has a bunch of wonderful features for encoding video.
With Handbrake you can set up ‘presets’ which is perfect since I need to create one that my family can always default to. Here is the information about the preset that worked best for me:
Container: MKV
Video: MPEG-4 (FFMPEG), Quality 97%, Constant Rate Factor
Audio Codec: AC3 (Pass-thru)
This is going to expand the files from their compressed format. Most of my videos are roughly 4 times larger than the original .mts files, but they are now in an open format where you may do as you wish with them. This process is very resource intensive, on my machine (Quad core Q6600 with 8GB of ram) it takes a little while for each video, it would take much longer if you were actually doing a compression.
Please let me know if you get any better results using different settings! I tried using x264 but the quality was absolutely terrible compared to MPEG.
Resources:
Trans coding MTS/M2TS AVCHD Video Into AVI Files with Free Software (fsckin w/ linux)
AVCHD .m2ts conversion for Linux (AV Science Forum)
Nice post man
Great post. I want to use the command line tool (I think its cooler) but a gui would be prefered (so much easier). So handbrake converts MTS files???? I’ll have to check that out.
Yes using the command line tool is much cooler however you might have some issues getting the audio to sync up. I was in a bind and needed to get these videos converted without too much toying around so handbrake did the trick for me.
Handbrake is great software by the way, I wonder if they will ever offload the processing to CUDA…
I realize this is an old thread, but info lives forever on the internet .
I’m looking to pull movies off my Canon HF100 and have them in a more workable format. I’m running into a few problems that I’m wondering if you figured out.
Identifying the “movie”:
As you know the camera stores movies as a series of 2GB files. Is there a good (easy) way to identify which of the .mts files make-up a single movie stream?
Combining .mts files:
Once I know which set of files makes up one movie, can you recommend a way to combine them into a single output file? The methods I’ve read so far either require multiple encodings or using questionable software.
Handbrake is fantastic, but as far as I can tell it won’t let you use multiple .mts files to output to a single file.
That is an interesting issue, I was waiting to find a good video editor for linux. The gentleman behind the VLC project are about to release a cross platform tool for video editing. Your issue however sounds like something that could be taken care of with a really nice script. I will take a peek at my files and see if I can pinch them together.
Nice tool
but i use brorsoft video converter which is much easier ans faster to use.