How to work with MTS (HD video) files in Mac Finder
Created on May 11, 2009, last updated 1 year ago
In preparation for impending baby-dom, we bought our first real camcorder, a high-definition Cannon IXIA HF100. It's about a hundred times smaller than camcorders when I was a kid and it's dead quiet because it uses an SD card for storage. My enthusiasm for the new gadget abounded. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that I could not actually watch the resulting .MTS video files on my mac. After extensive searching, I've found a couple tools for decent MTS file integration with the mac, so here they are:
VLC will play MTS video without any additional codecs. And it's free. Nice.
Even though VLC will play the video, you won't get MTS file thumbnails in finder until you install this little app. It seems like it should be free, but the $7 price tag is reasonable enough.
Voltaic will convert MTS files to Quicktime format (maybe others as well, I haven't fired it up for a while). The $35 price tag on this one made me cringe, but it's one of only two product I know of that actually converts MTS files directly. Oddly enough, iMovie will import MTS from the camera, but won't import once it's a stand-alone file. I scoured the internet trying to find a way to trick iMovie into converting it anyway, and the only option I found was to clone your SD card and mount it as a drive whenever you want to import the video. The process seemed a little too crufty for my liking, so I shelled out for the Voltaic app.
At $80, it probably isn't worth it to get this app just for the MTS file conversion, but from what I read, it does it quite well, and faster than Voltaic HD.
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Comments
Nice guide!
Thx for sharing with some freeware,and I think Mplayer for Mac maybe also a nice choice.
And if you want to convert mts videos to dvd on mac for dvd player,just follow this guide:
How to Burn MTS videos to dvd on Mac ?
If you would like to put your beautiful camcorder video to your portable devices such as iPod, iPhone, mobile phones, you could use Pavtube MTS/M2TS Converter.
It is used to convert camcorder videos into AVI, MPEG, WMV, MOV, MP4, etc.
I prefer the program as its after-sale service is good. Last week, I encountered a problem and sent it to them, they replied and solved my problem on time.
So I think when choosing an appropriate program for ourselves, we should consider not only its quality, functions, but also its after-sale service.
Nice guide, it's really useful for me. I also found a step by step guide about how to burn HD MTS video to DVD on Mac, share it here.
To do batch conversions simply and very cheaply, consider www.ivideoconverter.net. You can drag an drop batch files into the program. Once loaded, you can convert to just about any codec and frame size, frame rate, quality that you can imagine or like to have.
Another good program for conversion and JUST recently updated is Handbrake. It was just updated to v0.94. This one is totally free and well-known. The only thing I wish it would do and does not is, drag and drop batch conversion. You need to drag the files in one by one, but nonetheless you can add the files to a queue. Apparently the reason for this is so that you can set parameters independently for each other and without any relationship to others in the queue.
I am also looking for a utility that will let me display a folder of MTS files as thumbnails, then do the Shft+Cmd+4 to do a screen capture of the thumbnails (for indexing and filing). It's a shame that Apple can update it's OS-X Finder to accommodate the latest video codecs, especially in consideration of that fact that Apple is supposedly multimedia-centric. Although it's not a lot of money, I also can't see paying $7 bucks just for this single handicap function. If you come across any other utility that might be able to do this in the mean time, I surely will appreciate the lead. Thanks.
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