Converting panasonic .MTS video into high quality mpeg videos?

Solution 1:

This site has a great tutorial on how to do it, and includes a helpful bash script that joins the MTS files before starting, as apparently not doing so can cause problems.

If you want to experiment before jumping into his instructions, you can try the following command. This creates an x264 AVI, you can easily change the output format by changing the libx264 part below to mpeg4.

ffmpeg -i your_file.MTS -acodec copy -vcodec libx264 -crf 21 -r 30000/1001 -deinterlace -vpre lossless_medium -y -threads 0 output_file.avi

Solution 2:

I used jozzas' method explained above, and converted a 124MB test MTS file to a 55 MB MP4 file.

Then, I downloaded Handbrake using the PPA install method, and with a single pass high profile conversion, converted the test file in one pass to a 49 MB file with no loss of quality.

A two-pass conversion using Handbrake resulted in a 19 MB file, again, with no loss in quality.

So, which do you want, the command-line version which reduces file size by 55%, or the GUI version which reduces file size by 85% ?