Comment 1 for bug 327872

I suppose really this is more of a feature request ...

Hi Def video formats (i.e., MTS) are quickly becoming the de facto standard for video camcorders and as such, Ubuntu users need a way to play, edit and see thumbnails of videos created. Currently a user must perform the following:

1) Download FFMPEG current at: http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg-checkout-snapshot.tar.bz2
2) Then compile/configure/install by running ./configure, make, make install
3) Extract the audio from the m2ts file to output.wav using mplayer:
    mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast:waveheader:file=output.wav xxx.m2ts
4) Extract the video from the m2ts file to output.avi using ffmpeg
    ffmpeg -i xxx.m2ts -vcodec mpeg2video -sameq -s 1920×1080 -r 23.976 -an -f avi -copyts -benchmark output.avi
5) Create a final .avi file by merging the audio and video using mencoder
    mencoder output.avi -o final.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -audiofile output.wav

This is a lot of extra work to simply view files from your new camcorder. Support therefore is required of:

- MTS container format
- H.264 CODEC (including PAFF interlacing, current FFMPEG in Ubuntu gives this error when tying to do the above without downloading the current FFMPEG: "[h264 @ 0xb7e8fa68]PAFF interlacing is not implemented" )
- 1920 X 1080 resolution

The support for this would be required to offer Ubuntu users the following features:
- See thumbnails of their videos in Nautilus (just like they do with other formats such as AVI, MPEG, MOV, OGV, etc.)
- Play/view/hear MTS files in Totem (both video and audio)

This would require incorporating bleeding edge FFMPEG into the distro. It would be the next great step towards multimedia ubiquity within Ubuntu (the next being a NLE app that works ... but that's another issue altogether ;)