Playing/Converting AVHDC .MTS files on OSX

Lately I've been using AVHDC (Advanced Video Coding High Definition) .MTS video files on OSX a bit. This video format is not greatly supported on OSX at this point in time. This HD format was developed by SONY and Panasonic and is considered to by a high quality format. My video files are coming from a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ10.

Playback
OSX does not currently natively support playback of these files. I recommend installing VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html which is both free and has a large enthusiastic usage community.

Conversion 
If you want to use these files in iMovie then you have to import them directly from the camera. This can be both slow and reduce the video quality. If you are not wanting to use iMovie and just want to convert to MPEG-2, DivX, H.264, etc. then you will probably have noticed most search results end up pointing to an expensive piece of conversion software with a heavily crippled trial version.

VLC (see above) does include conversion/export functionality, but its results are a bit unpredictable and is best suited to stream capture.

The best option I have discovered which is fast, reliable and free is Handbrake http://handbrake.fr/ This application is commonly used by some to rip DVD content to a playable file, but it has a great video transcoder at it's core and really does a great job converting .MTS files on OSX for free :)

Converting Media Formats

There are so many media format in common use these days that it's difficult to keep up with them, not just with when and why to use each format, but also being able to read them or convert between them.

Lately I found the need to convert a couple of different file formats that Windows isn't natively strong with. If you've ever tried to track down a codec for a slightly different format, then you'll know how annoying and confusing it can be, especially when you want to export to another format.

There is one tool I have found to be very useful in this area, and it's a great piece of freeware. The name of the application is "SUPER © Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer".



Here's a warning though - the website is not very aesthetic or user firendly, but it's worth the effort to get the free fully functioned application with codecs included. Just scroll to the bottom of the first two pages looking for the download link, and then the actual download link should be on the third page. If I post the download page link here it'll just redirect you to the first page anyway...

Just to prove that it's useful, here a vdeo I made with a an old .m4a file that I could finally convert to a more useful wav/mp3 and threw together twith some screen captures from Winamp's Milkdrop plugin. I wrote this track years ago (when I was in my "synth" phase), the original files are long gone...

Hey, Where'd My Space Go?

Recently I was doing some routine stuff when I noticed the was a LOT less space on my main hard-drive than I expected. I was down to less than 500MB of space! I remember the days when I was smug about having a 30MB drive when the guy working on the next PC only had a 20MB drive. It's hard to believe in this age of relatively gigantic drives we can still fill them up without too much effort. I guess we can put it down to the ever increasing filesizes driven by higher pixel counts of digital cameras, the recent epidemic of software bloat, and the invention of peer-to-peer file sharing.

I needed to free up some space, so I dug out my favourite drive-space analysis tool. It's pretty lean and has a great interface, so I thought I would share it here.



This is Steffen Gerlach's freeware application for Windows called Scanner. Once the application has scanned your drive, you can drill down through each folder of the sunburst chart to easily identify what has been gobbling up your drive space. Admittedly the initial scanning can take a few minutes, but no more than it takes to grab a cup of coffee.

FontSoup Screensaver

One weekend back in the middle of 2008, I spent a little bit of time rewriting the FontSoup Screensaver that I created back in 2001. It was long overdue for a revamp. The new incarnation is a lot more polished and now has two configurable display modes (Rainbow or Muted Tones).



This version displays your TrueType fonts in an elegant Win32 screensaver. You can download FontSoup 2.0 now for free.