@Nutsy

Two things create this problem:
1) A bit rate that is too low (commonly seen in 9mbps cameras).
2) Variable Bit Rate encoding where the bit rate is allowed to drop too low.

The best way to avoid this is to go for a high bit rate CBR setting if available.

1) huh? All of these are possible with AVCHD. Are you just saying you can't find a camera that does it?

No. If you look up the AVCHD spec you will see it has limited support for progressive formats. That's not to say that it is not possible, but the formats I mention would be out of specification and therefore may not be editable in NLEs.

There are video cameras that do 1080 50p/60p, but all the ones I know of record to AVC in a either an MP4 or AVI container.


2) I find this to be a great container. It supports variable bit rate audio (unlike AVI, etc.), has no size problems and seeks better than anything but Matroska.

Whilst I'd agree with you that a standard MPEG container would be best suited to MPEG-4, I'd have to say that it was the non-standard version of the MPEG-2 Transport container that I was objecting to.


3) At any given bit rate it has better picture quality than any alternative. If you don't like artifacts, use a higher bit rate.

In the beginning AVCHD was trumpeted as twice as efficient as HDV (MPEG-2), so a 13 mbps AVCHD video was said to be as good as a 25mbps HDV video. This was quickly debunked (due to motion trailing artefacts) and now most AVCHD cameras offer bitrates of 16 mbps-24 mbps. Using a higher bit rate does escape this problem, but the fact remains that H.264 is more prone to temporal artefacts.


4) There is plenty of software that supports it, at least by converting to an editable format. So go get some.

Whilst this is true now, as an early adopter of AVCHD I can say that it took nearly 2 years for a major NLE (Vegas) to natively support AVCHD (with Adobe Premier only adding support in CS4). I agree that the picture is far more rosy now, but there are still gaps.


6) Huh? H.264 handles all of this just fine.

Sorry, should have said 'codec implementations'. Check out the Wikipedia page on h.264 and it shows the patchy nature of interlacing support in codec implementations.


8) Frame differencing is here to stay for portable HD content capture devices. It's either that or have very short recording times.

MJPEG-2000 would have be a good quality/size choice for a intraframe codec.

What makes AVCHD rubbish?

1) The lack of support for 480/576/1080p @ 25*/30*/50/60 fps (and their fractional counterparts)
2) The use of a modified MPEG-2 Transport Stream as the container format
3) The motion trailing artefacts at lower bit rates
4) The sloth like adoption on NLEs (mostly due to point 2)
5) The high processing overhead
6) The poor support in codecs of the multiple/hybrid interlacing types.
7) The chroma sub-sampling instead of RGB 4:4:4
8) It interframe rather than intraframe, meaning it is less suitable for editing (and harder to seek).

* some cameras support these through putting the progressive frames in 50i and 60i frames.

Now don't get me wrong, AVCHD @ 24mbps looks great, so while it may not be 'worthless', it is still far from ideal.

The trend at the moment is for background listening of music rather than listening to music as the sole activity. Combine with this the loudness wars and MP3s reducing fidelity and you have the masses unable to discern good sound quality or just apathetic about sound quality and music in general.

Blu-Ray has potential as a music format, but to succeed it will need to draw in the apathetic as well as audiophiles (who may have already invested in DVD-A and/or SACD) and it'll need to come in at a far more attractive price point than the current crop of BR players.

To satisfy the audiophiles you need to have great stereo and multi-channel sound and use volume levelling to eliminate "the loudness wars". You'd also need to support audio only players.

Then to draw in the rest you need to add integrated bonus features (including internet connected content) to make it an obvious functional improvement over CD, DVD-A and SACD. Examples of bonus features are alternate song versions, music videos, interviews, news, tour dates, photos, artwork, lyrics, etc. You also need reasonable pricing of playback hardware.

One other aspect is that any new audio format should integrate iPod/MP3 player direct ripping support. If a format is not ripable then it will really struggle to gain traction (notice how nearly all SACDs are now hybrid SACDs).

Of course none of this would guarantee BD-A success, but it would give the format a fighting chance. In any event BD-A is likely to be one of the last physical music formats.

Vista Media Center is buggy and too US centric.

44 countries in the world use the DVB-T, however Media Center's support of this well established standard is patchy, to be precise no support for broadcast EPG, interactive services, subtitles, multiple audio streams, radio channels.

Then take something as simple as the music library. If you have two or more albums with the same album name, but different album artists, then the albums appear as separate entities but the track list contains all the tracks from all albums of the the same name. Oops!

I bought Vista because of Vista's Media Center, now I wish I'd spent the money on something more useful!

In Swansea HMV and Bristol HMV it is a similar story Blu-Ray occupies 80% of the HD Disc section.