I recently purchased the new Sony HDR-SR1 camcorder from Sony. It comes with a software installation disk. This is the only software that can handle the format used by this camcorder – AVCHD. This software is not compatible with Windows Vista. There is a bunch tools the installer will install on your system. Many of them will install fine. Sonic UDF reader will outright fail to install. Sony handycam utility will install without any problem but will not function. When you try to run, an empty message box with one button that says nothing will popup.
I have no clue what this message box is trying to tell me. I am going back to Windows XP to do my camcorder stuff – there is nothing much you can do with AVCHD at this point, but just upload it to your PC – and then come back to Vista for other things because I like to work on Vista.
See one of my earlier post on this subject for more details.
One of my new toys for this holiday season is a new HD Camcorder from Sony, the all new HDR-SR1. Many features on this camcorder are new. It is a 1080i HD camcorder. It has a 30 GB hard drive. It also records in AVCHD format. What the heck is this AVCHD format? Turns out that this is a new format developed by Sony and Matsushita, the parent company of Panasonic. Fine. Now I would expect there be some software available from Sony to do some kind of editing for this format. Not yet. No one has support for editing this format as of today. Most of the video editing software that I downloaded and tried does not even recognize the files generated by the camcorder.
I looked around and found that there are some workarounds available to get this converted to WMVHD. I am not convinced about that because the links never worked. Here is what Sony says about the support for this format in leading Video Editing Software (not the high end kind). Sony Vegas also will not support AVCHD until 2007 spring.
Sony says PS3 can play the DVD/Blue Ray disc created by the burning program supplied with the camcorder. May be another reason to buy a PS3 
I hope Microsoft will start supporting this format in xbox 360 or Zune software so that I do not need special software to handle this and can view it on my HDTV using xbox 360. Some expert on another blog said you need Windows Vista to watch your video on HDTV using xbox 360. Well, you don’t. All you need is Windows XP with Windows Media Player 11 or Zune software. I can view all my pictures and Videos including high definition (WMVHD) and play music using the Windows Media Player 11 on xbox 360. It would be nice if I can get support for AVCHD in xbox 360 through some mechanism.
Update: I have seen many people claiming that TMPGEnc 4.0 Express can open the files generated by the Sony HDR-SR1 camcorder. I don’t think that it is the case. From my initial tests it did not open the m2ts file. Here is a screen shot. I will post more details if I am able to get it working somehow.
Update 7/7/7: I have posted a bit more information about how to convert and burn AVCHD here. As of this writing the software are not that good. I am hoping that they will fix those issues in the coming months.