I'll be releasing some HD videos for a couple of side projects in the not too distant future. Currently they are edited but are enormous .m2ts AVCHD files. My old DivX software won't handle them, but I know I can't release them as they are, they'd take up far too much of MM's disk space.

Anyone got any recommendations for software to use to re-encode them down to a sensible size while retaining the quality? Ideally I'd like something that will allow me to select "none" for the audio codec (i.e. no audio), or similar for entirely removing the soundtrack without having to mess about with lots of silent background music files and balancing. Basically I want a "silent movie" button, which DivX provided in the form of a tick box to select the audio track - untick it, no audio. Everything I've looked at gives dozens of audio options, but none of them include "None!".

Will be posting some teaser pics soon!

I know Mac applications that can do it, I'm betting you are on Windows though. Let me know if not.




I have had to deal with stuff like that recently, if you want you can bump it over to me on a server and I can turn them into whatever you need if it's a one time thing.

PM me if I can help.

You're going to need something expensive or unauthorized The MPEG2 codec and the AVCHD container are both proprietary and licensed. Anything based on FFMPEG like Mplayer can handle the codec, but I don't know much about free apps that support AVCHD. That might be difficult. If it's been edited, can you talk whoever did the editing into rendering it out to some other intermediate format for you instead of AVCHD?

If you're on windows, there's a trial version of Vegas here. Vegas definitely does AVCHD and MPEG2, and you can render out to h263, h264, WMV, MPEG2, or any number of other things.

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/download/trials/vegaspro

I've never used it without a license key so I don't know if it just works and then quits after 30 days or if it watermarks everything until you pay for it.

Quicktime Pro can probably convert it to something useful, if you want to spend about $30

Have I mentioned before how much AVCHD sucks ass?

I think you mentioned it once. Can't be said enough.


Looking at it, it's plain old MTS I have been having to convert.

Fucking wrappers.