Some camcorders and compact digital cameras (e.g. Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ7), are capable of recording HD video which is saved in MTS files. Most of the video editing applications, such as the Apple's iMovie, can not read these files directly but a conversion is required. Fortunately, the free ffmpeg converter can take care of the conversion process. The prerequisite is that you have a recent ffmpeg version (e.g. April 2009) compiled and installed. See these instructions for details how to do it in Linux or Mac OS X. Then the MTS files can be converted conveniently to MPEG-4 as follows.


ffmpeg -i 00001.MTS -sameq 00001.mp4