Without a doubt, the digital technology advanced in recent years has enabled people to deal with AVCHD video files more easily and flexible. You can drop the AVCHD 1080p recordings you shot with camcorder into Blu-ray player and enjoy onto a big HDTV, you can perform editing on AVCHD footage via Sony Vegas or Final Cut Pro, you can put AVCHD video clips onto social networks to share with loyal fans.
The problem, however, is if you try to transfer the AVCHD videos straight from your camcorder to a mobile device, you may get an error message that says it don't support the format, especially if you're on a Mac, things get worse. In order to solve that, you will have to convert these AVCHD videos into something more manageable. Today we'll show you how to convert AVCHD to Xvid video on a Mac or PC machine.
What is Xvid?
Xvid is an open source video codec library following the MPEG-4 standard. It allows taking strong compression ratios of 200:1 or more without causing visible quality loss, meaning the resulting files can be 200 times smaller than the source video. A big benefit of using Xvid to encoding video is that most popular video player apps have a support for it, so does home entertainment hardware devices like TVs or DVD/ Blu-ray players.
AVCHD to Xvid converter - Mac and Windows
Look around and you see countless AVCHD to Xvid converter for Mac and Windows OS. We like Video Converter for its clean, simple yet powerful. You point the program to the AVCHD video you want to convert, choose Xvid or device preset as output, give a location for saving files and press the 'Convert' button. It accepts almost every popular format you can think of as input and convert into formats you like. Extra features including video editing and parameters tweaking let you enhance the resulting video.
Download the right copy of program according to your computer by clicking the link above and fire it up.
Stage 1 – Load AVCHD clips
In the top menu, click "Add File" to open file browser dialog. Next we need to browse computer and select the AVCHD file(s) that we are going to convert to Xvid, and click "Open". The video(s) will be shown in the program window.
Stage 2 – Choose your output Format, Device, Quality, and saving Path
Once your AVCHD movie files are open, click on "Profile" drop down menu you will then see a pop-up window with a great selection of audio & video format and preset profiles. For our case, we need to convert AVCHD to Xvid video on Mac.
Note that Xvid is not a container file, just a video codec used for encoding video in container. So in order to convert AVCHD into Xvid video you will need to select a container that use Xvid codec.
From our experience, AVI is the container file to go. So from "HD Video" list, we select XviD HD Video (*.avi) as the result exporting format.
If you need to take more control over the output settings, assuming you're an experienced user, then there are options to change the default value for video & audio encoder, frame rate, resolution, bitrate, aspect ratio, channels, sample rate.
Choose a preset when it comes to converting AVCHD for watch on your chose device
In addition to converting AVCHD to Xvid file or other specific formats for Mac/ PC use, on the left hand side of the window is a list of presets. These are useful when you intend to convert the (AVCHD) video for watching on your device such as AVCHD movie files onto iPad, Apple TV, Android tablet, PS4.
Once you select a preset you like, the program will set up all appropriate settings automatically for you, which saves you a lot of time rather than checking your device's specs.
After that, back to main screen. You click the "Browse" button next to file-path text at the bottom of screen to choose where the Xvid file will be saved.
Stage 3 – Start the conversion
You may check all of the previous operations are OK to avoid any mistake.
Alternatively, you simply press the blue "Convert" button to begin converting AVCHD files to Xvid video on Mac OS X. Depending on the output settings you configure, the length of the AVCHD video(s) and your computer power, the conversion could take anything from a few minutes to hour to complete.
YOU'RE DONE!! Have a fun with your video(s)!
Conclusion
This AVCHD to Xvid converter may have a simple interface, but once you've learned the basics and do some experimentation, the program turns out to be powerful yet easy to operate. The useful video editing features and built-in presets even give you capability to make the video in your own way.
If you need the AVCHD video to be imported into iTunes, see how to import AVCHD into iTunes library.
