How to make Archos play AVCHD/.m2ts video without converting

[Mr_Archos]

Hi guys,

I was experimenting with a way to use my Archos 43, to watch video I shot with my Sony AVCHD camcorder or watch all TV films and shows I recorded with my Playstation 3 using Play TV device.

I discovered that, Sony being Sony, prefers AVCHD over DivxHD and MKVHD format, as the way to record HD video.

Archos 43 and other Gen8 Archos tablets can play DivxHD and MKVHD formats, but not AVCHD.

I did some search on Google on AVCHD and discovered that AVCHD actually uses the H.264 codec a.k.a MP4. Now Archos 43 can play .mp4 files. So why not AVCHD?

I then had a hunch. I copied the AVCD folder of my Sony camcorder onto my Archos 43 SD card. When I opened the folder using the Archos file manager app, I saw that the AVCHD folder had large files with .m2ts at the end. I remembered that my Playstation 3 records all the video in .m2ts.

So this must mean all the video files in the AVCHD folder are in .m2ts format!

I then followed on my hunches, based on the fact that if Archos 43 can play mp4 files, it must be able to play AVCHD files i.e. the .m2ts files somehow.

But how can I get the Archos 43 to recongnise .m2ts files?

Here is what i did: I simply renamed the .m2ts as .mp4.

So for one of the files in my AVCHD folder called trip_to_venice .m2ts I renamed it trip_to_venice .mp4.

Now keeping fingers crossed I launched my favorite video player on my Archos 43, the one and only VitalPlayer, and sure enough it began to play my trip_to_venice .mp4 smoothly, even though it stubbornly refused to play it originally as trip_to_venice .m2ts

So thats how you can use your Archos or any Android device to watch AVCHDs videos from your camcorder or Playstation 3 Play TV recordings, with out any converting

Godfrey,
London.

[paulus3476]

You talk about the Archos being able to play these files - that to me means the built in Media player along with its h/w acceleration, did you try to play them with this ? The aftermarket video players available will pretty much play any video format you throw at them - I,m sure you can find one that plays M2TS files without renaming them, the big question is how well does it play them, without the H/W acceleration of the Archos videoplayer most HD video plays poorly.

[Mr_Archos]

You talk about the Archos being able to play these files - that to me means the built in Media player along with its h/w acceleration, did you try to play them with this ? The aftermarket video players available will pretty much play any video format you throw at them - I,m sure you can find one that plays M2TS files without renaming them, the big question is how well does it play them, without the H/W acceleration of the Archos videoplayer most HD video plays poorly.

Thats odd, i tried over 9 video players for the Android/Archos, but NONE can play m2ts. Only Windows/Mac apps like VLC or Zoom player can play .m2ts files. According to Google searches, No Android, Blackberry, iPhone/iPad and Windows Mobile device can play .m2ts files as yet. None!

So my discovery is unique! Just giveme the credit am due ok, em...not a Noble Prize.

[Greg_e]

I bet I can find an m2t file that will not work with the above name change, in other words this is not a universal fix. Many of the more recent Sony cameras have gone to the mp4 extension and h.264 codec, but be careful because the gen8 devices do not play 60 frames per second, and do not play more than 6mbps which cuts out most cameras.

[Mr_Archos]

I bet I can find an m2t file that will not work with the above name change, in other words this is not a universal fix. Many of the more recent Sony cameras have gone to the mp4 extension and h.264 codec, but be careful because the gen8 devices do not play 60 frames per second, and do not play more than 6mbps which cuts out most cameras.

I agree my "discovery" or "invention" (which I will not rush to the patent office to patent the process" is not a universal fix. However every single video file I recorded either on my Sony HD camcorder or my Playstation PlayTV device, all ran smoothly with Vital Player. There were no problems. On my Sony HD camcorder settings, HD video was recorded as 24fps and video HD bitrate and resolution was set to lower value, i.e. my HD video was 720p not full HD. While on my the Playstation 3 PlayTV video settings were all defaults values.

I did discover 2 main hiccups though.

Issue 1.)
Of the 8 video players I have on my Archos 43, only Vital Player played the renamed .m2ts files with no problems. Other video players (including the one pre-installed on Archos) did not work well. This is not surprising. Renaming the video file from .m2ts to .mp4 allows an Android video app to ONLY recognize the video file. However the containing video structure is STILL AVCHD.

AVI, MKV and MP4 are technically all video/audio containing formats, and a Program Stream (PS) standard arrangement is normally expected to be in the container by video players to play the file. When you rename a video file e.g. from .avi to .mp4, the strict Program Stream (PS) rules are broken.

E.g. under Program Stream (PS) rules:
AVI video containers as .avi, normally have MP3 or AC3 (Dolby) as audio codec + MPEG-4 (Divx/Xvid) as video codec.

MP4 video containers as .mp4, normally have any of the AAC variants as audio codec + MPEG-4 (H.264/AVC) as video codec. So if a .mp4 file which was originally an .avi file and renamed to .mp4, had MP3 as the audio codec instead of AAC, a video player will be confused, as it was expecting AAC or AC3 as the audio codec, as per the agreed standards set by the MPEG guys who set up the MP4 (Program Stream MPEG-4 standards back in 1989).

However AVCHD containers as .m2ts is different from MP4 container (i.e the .m2ts Program Stream (PS) is different from the one for MP4) as.m2ts will have usually have more than 2 streams of video/audio not conforming to the MPEG-4 standards for MP4; several other helper files; and also a subtile stream (i.e. for TV recordings, e.g. Playstation PlayTV records the subtitles of a terrestrial digital TV program as a separate DVB-T stream file).

So all the 8 Android video players (e.g. Rock Player) except Vital Player were very confused when they began to play the renamed .m2ts file. They did not understand why the .mp4 file audio/video container Program Stream structures are different, so did not play the renamed file properly.

Only Vital Player said something along the lines: "ok, I know this is not an real .mp4 file, but I will still try to play it with brute force, as I still see that the dodgy .mp4 file still has some AVC codecs and some Dolby codecs inside it, but arranged in different way, much like an AVCHD container and not an MP4 container".

Luckily Vital Player is free to download.

Issue 2.)
Apart from being able to now watch my camcorder AVCHD/.m2ts recordings on my Archos 43, I also watch all my Playstation 3 PlayTV AVCHD/.m2ts digital terrestrial freeview TV recordings on my Archos 43. But I noticed that while VLC player for Windows 7/XP computers will have a menu option to allow you to play the DVB-T subtitles stream, alongside the TV recordings, Vital Player for Android does not have a menu option to do this yet, so no subtitles show up while watching a recorded TV program on the Archos. Maybe a future update of Vital Player will have this option.

But theses two issues apart, all in all, renaming an AVCHD video from .m2ts to .mp4 and using Vital Player, presents the best way to watch ACVHD video on an Archos for the time being, without retorting to converting the file with conversion software, which can be very time confusing if you have lots n lots of AVCHD videos as I have (98 files at the last count).

Godfrey.

[paulus3476]

Thats odd, i tried over 9 video players for the Android/Archos, but NONE can play m2ts. Only Windows/Mac apps like VLC or Zoom player can play .m2ts files. According to Google searches, No Android, Blackberry, iPhone/iPad and Windows Mobile device can play .m2ts files as yet. None!

So my discovery is unique! Just giveme the credit am due ok, em...not a Noble Prize.

'NONE' is a bold statement - you should have tried moboplayer, it plays m2ts files without problem

[julian67]

uses the H.264 codec a.k.a MP4.

Now Archos 43 can play .mp4 files.......the fact that if Archos 43 can play mp4 files, it must be able to play AVCHD files

Here is what i did: I simply renamed the .m2ts as .mp4.

Hi Godfrey, you'll probably have more success if you understand what these file types (and file name extensions) mean and what they don't mean.

H.264 is not MP4 by another name. H.264 is a codec while MP4 is a container. Within an mp4 container you might find the video stream codec is h.264 or xvid or divx or Nero digital. The audio could be aac, mp3, ac3, and so on.

m2ts is another container which might contain streams using different video codecs, but not all the same codecs as mp4 supports, and it also supports various different audio stream codecs such as dts, pcm and so on.

Other containers you'll probably find familiar are .avi and .mkv. Different containers have different capabilities and purposes and limitations.

So when you find the Archos device can play many different mp4 files it doesn't follow that it can play all mp4 files. Yes it supports the mp4 container/file format but equally important is which video and audio codecs it supports. You can find that specified at archos.com product specs, for example the A43 page shows it supports

ÔÇó MPEG-42 HD (up to 720p, 30 fps@6Mbps)
ÔÇó MPEG-42 (ASP@L5 AVI, up to DVD resolution, 30 fps@8Mbps)
ÔÇó H.264 HD (HP@L3.1 up to 720p, 30 fps@5Mbps)
ÔÇó WMV9/VC1 (AP up to 720p 30 fps@10Mbps)
ÔÇó M-JPEG (Motion JPEG Video) in VGA resolution

With optional plug-in (downloadable on http://www.archos.com):
ÔÇó Cinema: MPEG-2 (up to DVD resolution MP/D1, 30 fps@10 Mbps)
With the above codecs, the device can play video files with the following extensions: AVI, MP4, MKV, MOV, WMV, MPG, PS, TS, VOB, FLV, RM, RMVB, ASF, 3GP

So to play a file you need a supported container which contains only supported audio, video, subtitle and metadata streams. You don't need to rely on trial and error, you can use a free tool like mediainfo to find out what your video file actually contains and then you'll know if it can be played on your device. If the video and audio are good but it's in an unsupported container then renaming isn't really ideal. A better way is to remux the file into a supported container. This isn't the same as transcoding. The video and audio are not converted or altered so it isn't time consuming. They are simply extracted and then placed into the preferred container. On a typical UNIX like OS such as BSD or Linux or Mac OS X you can use ffmpeg

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -i myfile.m2ts -acodec copy -vcodec copy myfile.mp4

which would take the audio and video from myfile.m2ts and copy it into myfile.mp4 without changing it, so no quality loss and it's extremely fast (video playback is usually about 25 frames per second, while a simple remux will probably run at thousands of frames per second). I guess you use Windows (because most people do) and I'm sure you can find all kinds of free video converter tools which have an option to copy the video and audio without transcoding it. And I'd strongly recommend visiting the archos site and checking the specs for your device and then using mediainfo to determine if your video is going to be playable. You can save yourself a lot of time. You might also find that once you know what is what you can set your camcorder to produce files that you know will play on all your devices.

[Mr_Archos]

uses the H.264 codec a.k.a MP4.

Now Archos 43 can play .mp4 files.......the fact that if Archos 43 can play mp4 files, it must be able to play AVCHD files

Here is what i did: I simply renamed the .m2ts as .mp4.

Hi Godfrey, you'll probably have more success if you understand what these file types (and file name extensions) mean and what they don't mean.

H.264 is not MP4 by another name. H.264 is a codec while MP4 is a container. Within an mp4 container you might find the video stream codec is h.264 or xvid or divx or Nero digital. The audio could be aac, mp3, ac3, and so on.

m2ts is another container which might contain streams using different video codecs, but not all the same codecs as mp4 supports, and it also supports various different audio stream codecs such as dts, pcm and so on.

Other containers you'll probably find familiar are .avi and .mkv. Different containers have different capabilities and purposes and limitations.

So when you find the Archos device can play many different mp4 files it doesn't follow that it can play all mp4 files. Yes it supports the mp4 container/file format but equally important is which video and audio codecs it supports. You can find that specified at archos.com product specs, for example the A43 page shows it supports

ÔÇó MPEG-42 HD (up to 720p, 30 fps@6Mbps)
ÔÇó MPEG-42 (ASP@L5 AVI, up to DVD resolution, 30 fps@8Mbps)
ÔÇó H.264 HD (HP@L3.1 up to 720p, 30 fps@5Mbps)
ÔÇó WMV9/VC1 (AP up to 720p 30 fps@10Mbps)
ÔÇó M-JPEG (Motion JPEG Video) in VGA resolution

With optional plug-in (downloadable on http://www.archos.com):
ÔÇó Cinema: MPEG-2 (up to DVD resolution MP/D1, 30 fps@10 Mbps)
With the above codecs, the device can play video files with the following extensions: AVI, MP4, MKV, MOV, WMV, MPG, PS, TS, VOB, FLV, RM, RMVB, ASF, 3GP

So to play a file you need a supported container which contains only supported audio, video, subtitle and metadata streams. You don't need to rely on trial and error, you can use a free tool like mediainfo to find out what your video file actually contains and then you'll know if it can be played on your device. If the video and audio are good but it's in an unsupported container then renaming isn't really ideal. A better way is to remux the file into a supported container. This isn't the same as transcoding. The video and audio are not converted or altered so it isn't time consuming. They are simply extracted and then placed into the preferred container. On a typical UNIX like OS such as BSD or Linux or Mac OS X you can use ffmpeg

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -i myfile.m2ts -acodec copy -vcodec copy myfile.mp4

which would take the audio and video from myfile.m2ts and copy it into myfile.mp4 without changing it, so no quality loss and it's extremely fast (video playback is usually about 25 frames per second, while a simple remux will probably run at thousands of frames per second). I guess you use Windows (because most people do) and I'm sure you can find all kinds of free video converter tools which have an option to copy the video and audio without transcoding it. And I'd strongly recommend visiting the archos site and checking the specs for your device and then using mediainfo to determine if your video is going to be playable. You can save yourself a lot of time. You might also find that once you know what is what you can set your camcorder to produce files that you know will play on all your devices.

Hi julian67,

Thanks for correcting my mistakes, I had no time to edit it, to show my understanding of video formats. However I have not asked you for the difference between a codec and a video container, nor have I asked you for details on the video playing specs of the Archos 43. You have left out in your reply, the need to explain why when I renamed a .m2ts file to .mp4 it worked.

Lets stay FOCUSED and to the point, no chit chat on codecs:

The reason for my tutorial on codecs above was that I was desperately trying to explain why Vital Player on Archos 43, was able to recognize and play a .m2ts renamed as .mp4, but did not play the file when it was in the original name, i.e. .m2ts.

So if you a genius or Professor in video technology then please explain this to all of us....in plain English and to the point.

If you check out the original sentences in my post, I was trying to find a way to play .m2ts files on my Archos with Vital Player and discovered that renaming the file did the trick. i then attempted to explain why this trick worked.

So stay focused and the point when you reply ok, or go stroll elsewhere.

Thanks.

Godfrey.

[Mr_Archos]

Thats odd, i tried over 9 video players for the Android/Archos, but NONE can play m2ts. Only Windows/Mac apps like VLC or Zoom player can play .m2ts files. According to Google searches, No Android, Blackberry, iPhone/iPad and Windows Mobile device can play .m2ts files as yet. None!

So my discovery is unique! Just giveme the credit am due ok, em...not a Noble Prize.

'NONE' is a bold statement - you should have tried moboplayer, it plays m2ts files without problem

Not bad, out of over 15 video players for the Android/Archos, only moboplayer, plays m2ts files without problem. Let download it and try it out thoroughly and give a feed back here later.

Cheers

[pressurehold]

You may also try iDealshare VideoGo which can directly play AVCHD .m2ts or .m2t without converting on Mac or Windows.

If you need to play M2TS on portable devices, you may also use iDealshare VideoGo to convert M2TS to MP4 at http://www.idealshare.net/video-convert ... ndows.html

This guide can helps to convert AVCHD/M2TS/MTS to WMV, AVI, MP4, MPG, DV, Apple ProRes, FLV, H.264.

[holuu]

Try Wonderfox video converter http://www.videoconverterfactory.com/hd ... converter/

[Lisaostos]

Is it true that out of over 15 video players for the Android/Archos, only moboplayer, plays m2ts files without problem? But using Video Converter Ultimate for converting M2TS files is very easy and it helps you enjoy video without limitation on many devices. If you need to play M2TS on portable devices, you may try to convert M2TS to MP4.