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Holy crap on a pogo stick, 10.8 natively supports AVCHD!

C

CausticPuppy

macrumors 68000
Original poster
May 1, 2012
1,536
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I never thought this day would arrive. You can natively playback AVCHD using the new quicktime player included in Mountain Lion (avchd support is buried within the "200 new features" list on apple's site).

Naturally, you still can't just play .MTS files directly, I mean why would Apple want to make it that easy..... but if you have the whole AVCHD directory structure, the "private" folder shows up as a quicktime playable file. Opening it will open a window that generates previews for all video files (this can take a while), which seems to happen every time you open package.

The playback itself works very well, even on my old 2.66 Core2Duo Macbook Pro. CPU usage is much lower than when using VLC, and it does a better job de-interlacing, so I think it's FINALLY using GPU acceleration for the playback.

Nice to know that I can (in the future) just hook a mac mini up to my TV, and play my camcorder files directly off the SD card without having to transcode anything!
 
This is huge and great! No more need to convert all my home video to play it.

Too bad Quick Time player doesn't AirPlay. Why Apple, why do we often get HALF of what we really need/expect?
 
It's about time.....now lets see how long it takes to fix the poor video output resolution from Imovie
 
My eyes may deceiving me because I'm so full of optimism, but I think QT is less jerkier than in VLC.

I like QT's new export feature. It creates a HTML page embedded with your choice of 3 file formats, and size.

What exactly do you mean? iMovie will still require importing in as AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec). Do you mean preview/play mode or exporting?

kev6677 said:
It's about time.....now lets see how long it takes to fix the poor video output resolution from Imovie
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
kev6677 said:
It's about time.....now lets see how long it takes to fix the poor video output resolution from Imovie
Click to expand...

It actually does have good export resolution, you just have to select "Export as Quicktime" and then tweak your output settings. I really wish they had a way to create output presets. I also wish they gave you more built-in export options also.
 
CausticPuppy said:
I never thought this day would arrive. You can natively playback AVCHD using the new quicktime player included in Mountain Lion (avchd support is buried within the "200 new features" list on Apple's site).
Click to expand...

It was only a matter of time, they pretty much had to because most camera MFG's have adopted some form of AVCHD which has become standard for HD video cameras.
 
Well I gotta say that Quicktime's handling of AVCHD is quite poor right now. The actual playback is great, but there's no way of playing sequential clips. You have to re-open the "private" file every time you want to play a different clip.

It's nice they got the codec stuff worked out but damn.... the workflow is clumsy as hell.
 
CausticPuppy said:
Well I gotta say that Quicktime's handling of AVCHD is quite poor right now. The actual playback is great, but there's no way of playing sequential clips. You have to re-open the "private" file every time you want to play a different clip.

It's nice they got the codec stuff worked out but damn.... the workflow is clumsy as hell.
Click to expand...

Sounds like an opportunity for a Mac Developer to put together a decent app to do just that. I guess the handling of AVCHD playback is right in the OS now, so any app can access that API, right?
 
ftaok said:
Sounds like an opportunity for a Mac Developer to put together a decent app to do just that. I guess the handling of AVCHD playback is right in the OS now, so any app can access that API, right?
Click to expand...

I would assume so. Hope so.
 
I just use Movist to play back AVCHD. Still wish Apple's apps handled it better, but third party stuff works fine.
 
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