MPEG Transport Stream, also known as MTS or M2TS, is a standard format for transmission and storage of audio, video, and data, and is used in broadcast systems such as DVB and ATSC. They are primarily associated with AVCHD, which is a format for the recording and playback of high definition video, jointly established by Sony Corporation and Panasonic Corporation in 2006 for use in their digital tapeless camcorders.
You may wonder that what the difference between MTS and M2TS on earth is . Well, when you are talking about AVCHD, there is no difference between them other than the filename. You may have noticed that the files on camcorder or files dragged from camcorder to PC are .MTS extension. However, if you use Pixela or PMB to import/copy them to PC, those files will have extension .M2TS. Exactly, they are identical.
Both the MTS and the M2TS files can be played on Cyber Link Power DVD, Cyber Link Power Director, Sony Picture Motion Browser, Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum. And if we dont have them, actually if you wanted to view the MTS/M2TS video on your MAC OS, how would you do?
Then Final Cut Pro, shorten as FCP, comes on our mind, for it can load MTS/M2TS video files and edit it easily, then exports them to other video formats as your wish, as well as export video formats as MTS or M2TS for HD camcorder. There are only three simple steps to play MTS or M2TS on your FCP.
Step 1: Connect HD camcorder to your Mac, and it shows up as a drive on the desktop.
Step 2: Hit Cmd-Shift-8 to open the Log and Transfer window(FCP 6 or above).
Step 3: The clips in HD camcorder will be ready for being imported to FCP for editing.
Things will be done in seconds. However, there would be something different if some MTS or M2TS video files could not be compatible with Final Cut Pro. And now if we want to export our HD Camcorder video to Mac and view it on other Media Player or device, we would find it difficult to make it, because of the video format is not supported by other video players or devices.
In these cases, fortunately, we can change the video formats by specific video converter. It likes a container by which you can import any video with different formats and export any video formats according to your requirements. Thus, by this kind of video converter, we can import MTS or M2TS format videos and just click Convert to change the format to other popular formats like
converting MTS to MPEG. and so on. Of course, generally, you can use the converter for simple editing. For more details, the tutorial How to convert MTS/M2TS to FCP on Mac would be a good reference.
In conclusion, though MTS and M2TS are very popular on HD Camcorder, they are not very easy to reuse and share on Mac or PC. Most of time, we need to refer to the third party application to bridge the gap. Maybe one day, all of different video formats could be supported by Media Player and Device, thats would be great.
