AVCHD and avidemux

Many current camcorders store video according to the AVCHD specification. This is a MPEG2 transport stream with video encoded in H.264 and audio in Dolby AC-3 format.

avidemux which usually is my Swiss army knife for video conversion could not handle the .MTS files produced by the camcorder - at least not the version which are currently available in the Ubuntu repositories (avidemux 2.5.x).

After visiting the avidemux homepage I was pleased to find out, that version 2.6 can handle that format.

This post describes how to compile avidemux 2.6. It mostly reflects the process laid out in the avidemux wiki with some additional information to avoid some pitfalls.

I tested it on vanilla installs of Ubuntu Natty and Precise and the compilation works like a charm. Please keep in mind that you compile from nightly builds and not all functions are implemented yet (May 2012, git revision 7949).

Requirements:

First we need git to pull the source code:

sudo apt-get install git

For the core application

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev gcc g++ make cmake pkg-config libpng12-dev fakeroot yasm

For the GUI (QT4)

sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev

For the common plugins

sudo apt-get install libaften-dev libmp3lame-dev libx264-dev  libfaad-dev libfaac-dev

For the PulseAudio plugin

sudo apt-get install libpulse-dev

Download the source

git clone git://gitorious.org/avidemux2-6/avidemux2-6.git

Compile it

cd avidemux2-6

bash bootStrap.bash --deb

This will produce four .deb files in the ./debs folder.

Install it

cd debs

dpki -i *

Run it

avidemux3_qt4

Configure it

Sometimes you have to select the correct audio device in Edit - Preferences - Audio - AudioDevice:

Links:

avidemux homepage + wiki