My in-laws have got a shiny new Panasonic HDC-SD9, which records video in AVCHD. Unfortunately, their computer isn't powerful enough to do anything with the files, so I'm looking for a way to transcode the files to a format suitable for burning to DVD-Video.

The files play back fine in VLC, but when I try to use mencoder (a relatively new Win32 build), the audio and video get out of sync, and it gives up.

What's the easiest way to do this? I figured that maybe "transcode" might be able to do it, but the command-line syntax for that is arcane, to say the least. mencoder's not much better, so it's possible that I've just not got the right incantation.

VLC has a transcode feature in the GUI, at least for MacOS. (File->Streaming/Exporting Wizard) You might want to give that a shot.

You may want to also look at Quicktime Pro, that seems to do a good job of handling the AVCHD from my Panasonic. That is on the Macbook of course.

Cheers

Cris.