iCoolsoft AVCHD Converter for Mac

iCoolsoft AVCHD Converter for Mac is a video conversion utility that was designed to let you convert AVHCD files taken with HD camcorders into everyday formats.

AVCHD is a very popular format among camcorder makers. It allows for very crisp video at high resolutions. The problem is that the format is not widely supported. Some video players can open and play files encoded using this format just fine, but most mobile devices won't. This app lets you convert those files to a variety of formats, including H.264, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD, MOV, and a host of other ones. There are conversion profiles both for multimedia playback devices and for Mac apps such as Final Cut Pro, QuickTime and iMovie.

To test the application, I downloaded an MTS sample file from the Internet and converted it into HD H.264. The file was encoded using the AVCHD codec at a resolution of 1080p. It was 7 seconds long and had a file size of 11.5 megabytes. The trial of this app only lets you convert half of the videos that are 5 minutes or less in length. So, the resulting file was 3 and a half seconds long. The application took 42 seconds to convert 3 and a half seconds of video, which is a lot. The resulting file looked absolutely stunning, though, and I couldn't see any artifacts or anything that indicated a loss of quality.

Like all the video converters that I tried by iCoolsoft, this one comes with a basic video editor and a video player, and lots and lots of conversion profiles. Conversion from and to other formats also worked well.