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  1. Member
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    May 2009
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    Hello, sorry for the long post, but I spent alot of time researching this issue and need to get my thought process off my chest.

    I just bought a PCH A-110 (and updated the firmware, and added a compatible internal 1TB Seagate HDD). Although the music and photo viewing abilities are good to have, I own a PCH pretty much for the solitary purpose of storing and watching on my HDTV all the .MTS video files from my brand new camcorder, the Canon Vixia HF S10.

    The .MTS files come straight from the camera (extracted using the supplied software, if only in order to generate the useful yyyymmddhhmmss.mts filenames and preserve the camcorder-native .cpi info files), and are in Canon's AVCHD (H.264) codec, at 1920x1080 @ 60i, with most of them at 24 Mbps. I am too busy to do any editing or stitching together of video clips; I'm only interested in placing the files in various layers of folders and sub-folders according to content (e.g. the subfolder "trip to Florida/day 3 - first beach day/morning breakfast" might contain like 5 clips from the 5 times I pressed start/stop on the camcorder recording various mundane activities involving going to and eating at IHOP that morning before heading out to the beach).

    Now that I have finally figured out (on my own, I might proudly add) that you have to press "play" rather than "enter" on the remote in order to get all the files in a given folder to play sequentially, there is only one thing kind of ruining the experience: the delay/pause between the playback of each file. At the end of a given clip, the screen goes black for a good 3-4-5 seconds, then there's a bit of a horizontal bar that flashes once very briefly (as well as a sometimes-audible static pop sound) on the TV as the PCH communicates with it to set the correct resolution and audio setting (even though identical with the last clip that just played), then finally the next clip in the folder starts playing. The thing is, sometimes you have like 10 clips in a row that are 4 seconds in length (beauty shots), and all those black pauses/pops in between them are extremely noticeable, ugly, and they just KILL the enjoyment of your otherwise shiny HD home movie.

    The camcorder itself can play back those same clips sequentially, very seamlessly and with no problems. But using the camcorder itself as my VCR is not an option. Other than that being a rather inelegant solution, the camcorder would be playing back from 32GB of internal memory and whatever SDHC cards are inserted into it ... and as my total collection of movies continues to grow to orders of magnitude greater size than that, what am I supposed to do; keep buying more SD cards and just leave the video stored on them? Or only use 1 SD card, and keep switching into it the movies I want to see from a HDD? No, I needed 1 place where the entirety of my collection would reside, and wouldn't require a home theatre PC or network set-up, or the asinine and expensive process of burning to BD-R and having a collection of those instead of a collection of SDHC cards. That's where the PCH with internal HDD came in. I even bought a separate external 1TB HDD to do backups of it. But my blasted PCH gives me those black pauses! Dag nab it!

    I thought about stitching the files together, but with all the short clips you come back with after a vacation, the process of joining them together can become tedious, and I really don't have the time.

    Also, one of the advantages of having a series of separate clips with yyyymmddhhmmss.mts filenames is that they serve as time-descriptive titles, which are the only way the clips retain any information as to when they were shot (apart from editing the video and inserting text, which I neither have the time nor the will to do, since I don't want to modify how the raw video looked in real life). By merging several clips together shot at different times over an afternoon, you'd lose the information on when each clip was shot.

    (I'd also mention that in actual fact, I'd like to retain more than just time and date, but the aperture and shutter speed as well, which is why I keep the .cpi files. Eventually maybe there will be some way that a media player will be able to play the video clips with the .cpi files incorporated into them, so you can see in real time, live, when during a clip your photo settings were changed in camera, or pinpoint the moment of New Year's while you were filming, when the time went from 11:59 p.m. Dec. 31st to 12:00 a.m. Jan 1st. Or, if I really have to, since I have the .cpi files handy, I can re-export them back to the camera to view the clips with the real-time information. However, by stitching the files together on the PC, there would be no way for an eventual media player to also merge their respective .cpi files intelligently to preserve the data I like. I'm finding that video is different from the digital photography that I'm used to, where the photographic data is preserved inside the jpeg as Exif info, including the date/time the photo was taken. With video, once it's extracted from the camera and separated from its .cpi info, it's just a naked video and you need some way of accurately preserving the data, such as the filename.)

    Does anyone know whether I can I do anything to change the PCH's behaviour? Does anyone have any instinct about a way I could compile my home movies in the way I want?

    Thanks for your help!
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  2. Member
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    May 2009
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    Anyone have any thoughts? Basically I'm looking for a good way to use a media extender like the A-110 to play back these .MTS's sequentially without pauses, just like the camcorder does in playback mode.

    And does anyone know how the metadata is recordred (the date/time + photographic data)? Is it in each frame of the .MTS file, or in the sidecar .CPI file, or do you have to image the entire AVCHD file folder structure as it exists on a given SD card in-camera? And how do you play that metadata back over the .MTS?

    Thanks to anyone who has any instinct of an answer.
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  3. Member
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    Jun 2009
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    Australia
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    I initially thought my WDTV media player could only play the .mts files one at a time. What i didn't do was use the 'play' button on the remote - i was using the 'enter' button. So when i pressed the 'play' button this time it played the numerous files automatically albeit with a 2 second blank screen when it reads the next file. It actually plays all the files within the folder. I'm using that to proof the files before i edit/trim the file and join them up into one file to be played back for the family.
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  4. Member
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    Hi Machoman, thanks for your post. As I had mentioned in my original post, I had indeed figured out that you have to press "play" on the PCH rather than "enter" in order to get all the files in a given folder to play back (and it does so in alphabetical order, as you mentioned). But I guess you're experiencing the same issue as I am with re-initialization pauses between each clip.

    I believe it should be possible for the PCH to emulate the camcorder's native playback function in streaming the video clips back sequentially with no pauses in between, but I'd like to figure out how.

    The other major concern is that, by stitching your .MTS's together into an .MT2S or other video container, you are probably losing all the metadata associated with the original .MTS clips. That's the frame-by-frame date/time stamp and shutter speed/aperture information that I need to find some way of keeping (it also includes other info, such as resolution, film modes, etc.). I believe all that metadata is preserved inside the .CPI files with the same filenames as the .MTS in-camera. However, I could be wrong, and it could be that you actually have to make an exact copy of the entire AVCHD file folder structure from the camcorder to your HDD (including the .MTS's, .CPI's, .MPL's, and possibly others in a specific folder/sub-folder structure), and get software that is able to understand that to play it back with toggle-able on/off metadata info over your clip.

    It's amazing that nobody seems to know how this works!
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  5. Member
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    Hi Davdcom4.6,
    Yes i think it was you who gave me the idea of using the 'play' button - Thank-you very much for the tip. I agree that it would be a dream come through if one can play back the numerous .mts files continously without any delay.
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  6. Member
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    Jun 2009
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    United States
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    How do you play MTS (MT2S) files in PC? I download AVISynth and Mts_2_Xvid, moved my MTS (MT2S) files to the same folder. No AVIS files have been created. Help!
    IamNewHere
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  7. Member
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    May 2009
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    Hi corp3, your post is a little off the topic of this thread, but I play my .MTS files back using either VLC media player (it can get a little choppy depending on your system and the bitrate of the clip you're playing back) or the ImageMixer 3 SE Player that came with my camcorder.
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