Trying to convert MTS files to something reasonable for website

[Newmomma]

Hi all,

I'm a newbie to video manipulating and streaming. I have a baby site that has very limited space on it that I want to upload my videos to. I have a video camera that has all my videos in this stupid MTS file that I can't view with anything. I've tried various free video converters and converted it to many different file types but either it warps the audio, or it is still too big to post on web. I've tried converting to .flv but it is only black screen with perfect audio. I don't mind buying a program if I know that it'll do what I need, but I don't really know what I need it to do?

What file type should I use to get the smallest file size while still keeping some sense of audio/video quality?

Thanks!!!

[Baldrick]

Convert to mp4 with h264 video and aac audio. It works fine with flash players. Use for example handbrake or xmedia recode.

Or just upload to you vimeo and embed it from your site.

[Newmomma]

Thanks! I'm trying to convert now...is there a free converter that you recommend? I'm using "free video converter" but I think it might be junk! also I'm an extreme newbie...what is you vimeo? and how do you embed?

[Newmomma]

Hmmm when I converted it it is simply black screen and I can still see the audio...what am I doing wrong???

[Baldrick]

handbrake and xmedia recode.

http://vimeo.com/ , it's like youtube but better....

[Newmomma]

Still frustrated! I used handbrake last night to convert to mp4 h264 with acc audio and it turned into a 67 meg file that was totally blurry and full of lines! It's only a little 1 min video...I think this video camera is awful if you can't do anything with the files it creates!