I have a Canon H100 video camera. This records high definition 1080p videos in a digital video format called AVCHD. It has been a pain to watch these videos. First of all, these videos don’t even play properly on my single core PC. My 3-4 year old PC is just not powerful enough. The video is choppy and jittery.. It is completely unwatachable. I have been watching these by copying the files to my camera and then connect it to my TV. If I had a PS3, I could take my memory card and plug it directly and watch these videos. But I don’t have a PS3. I normally use my legacy xbox which has XBMC installed, to watch and listen to my media. It sucks big time that I can’t watch my AVCHD videos through my xbox.

So the only way I can watch these AVCHD videos is to convert it to either an MPEG or AVI format. I know.. I know.. I am loosing video quality by down converting these videos… but till the time I can find a better way to watch these videos… thats what I am going to do. I did find a script at videohelp.com which was using some freeware tools.. But in my opinion the process was still painfull. My ideal tool would be to take these AVCHD files and either convert them to AVI/MPEG or to burn them to a DVD directly. Did I mention, I want this to be free too ;). You could also pay \$50.00 for ConvertXtoDVDwhich does that for you.

Another option is to create an AVCHD DVD which will play directly on a blue ray player or a PS3. Scott Johnson, CEO of AtTask has a script on his blog which will create the DVD disc which will play on a blue ray player.

I got my camera in 2007 and in 2010 I have finally found a software which does the video conversion for me. It’s called Free HD Converter V1.6.
The software works on my old machine.. It’s not fast but I just batch all the videos and a couple of hours later, I have the converted MpEG files. I wish this tools would stitch the many generated mpeg files together too. Maybe it does and I haven’t found the setting! I can now burn a DVD from the Mpeg files and send the videos of my new born to my Mom or upload to YouTube directly!!

Next step is to convert all my AVCHD videos to MPEG. Now only if somebody could just do that for me too ;)