[How to] Convert AVCHD ISO to MKV

Sunday, 07. 20. 2008  –  Category: Windows

These steps will help you convert an AVCHD ISO to MKV so it is playable on your PC.

After some searching after my previous post.

I have found the answer on the AfterDawn forums.

The only difference being that IsoMagic failed to open up the ISO at all.  Instead I used IsoBuster created by Smart Projects.

The software you will need is:

  • IsoBuster – (You will need to purchase, as free trial does not allow ability to extract.)
  • tsMuxeR - Freeware.
  • mkvtoolnix – Freeware (Windows download at the bottom.)

Here are the steps:

  1. Open the ISO in IsoBuster.  Navigate to the BDMV folder then the STREAM folder.
  2. In this folder you should find a the video called 00000.mts or 00001.mts or something similar.
  3. Extract this to somewhere on your harddrive.
  4. Once the file has finally finished extracting to the hard drive, open up tsMuxeR.
  5. Add the file you just extracted, you should have a window like the following:
  6. Press Start demuxing. This will take a few minutes depending on the size of the file and your computer.
  7. The outcome of this is that we will have seperate audio and video files which we will now merge together using a great tool called mkvmerge.
  8. In mkvmerge, we want to select the .ac3 file and the .264 file, so go to Add at the top right and select both these files.
  9. mkvmerge will correctly detect what sort of file they are, but you will need to manually set the fps of the video as mkvmerge won’t be able to detect it.  The output from tsMuxeR will tell you the fps, then all you need to do now is select where you want to save the finished MKV and press Start Muxing.
  10. Like the demux this will take a while depending on the files and the hardware in your PC, once complete you can play the MKV in your media player.

Job done.  Let me know in the comments if this worked for you.

Edit: See comments if you are getting an out of sync problem.

38 Responses to “[How to] Convert AVCHD ISO to MKV”

  1. Bas Says:
    4 August 2008 at 7:41 pm

    Works great!

  2. Tracy Says:
    4 August 2008 at 11:08 pm

    I followed your directions exactly (except for using daemon tools instead of IsoBuster) but the audio is out of sync in the resulting mkv file. I checked my source and the audio is fine.

  3. admin Says:
    5 August 2008 at 9:44 am

    @Tracy,

    I had this problem with one of mine, most came out OK, but one was out of sync. In the end I just used tsMuxeR again and muxed it as .ts which plays perfectly fine in SMPlayer.

  4. Lheurch Says:
    5 August 2008 at 8:53 pm

    Make sure you put the proper FPS. DO NOT round 23.976 up to 24. Pick the 24000/1001 option for this and it should work.

  5. Tracy Says:
    6 August 2008 at 2:37 am

    24000/1001 did the trick. I had used 23.976 but I guess that wasn’t close enough. Thanks for the help!

  6. name Says:
    11 August 2008 at 4:29 am

    Works great!! Thanks!

  7. Alex Says:
    13 August 2008 at 9:13 pm

    Hey thanks for this :) i have no PS3 to play these iso’s and powerdvd wasn’t an option ;) VLC plays these video files, flawlessly, as stated above, make sure you put the exact FPS otherwise you will have sync issues ;) cheers!!

  8. derrick Says:
    24 September 2008 at 8:54 am

    So, I’m trying to use .m2ts files from my hard disk video camera without success. After demuxing and merging the files to mkv, I get a still picture in VLC and audio for a few seconds, then VLC quits. Any suggestions?

  9. admin Says:
    24 September 2008 at 9:48 am

    You could try playing in SMPlayer and see if the same thing happens, if so then there must be a problem with the mkv that was produced.

  10. derrick Says:
    24 September 2008 at 1:20 pm

    Yeah, pretty much the same thing happened. Video is distorted with horizontal lines and the audio has an echoing effect. I’ll have to play some more with the two programs to see if I can get a better result. Thanks for the quick response.

  11. Abra Says:
    15 November 2008 at 10:56 pm

    Hi, Works excellent, except for the subs. It leaves me with sup subtitle files, and mvkmerge won’t read them…

  12. Stephen Says:
    27 November 2008 at 11:04 pm

    You only need steps 1-3 above.
    Then you can open the m2ts file directly in media player classic (comes with combined community codec pack).
    No splitting audio, etc so audio is in perfect sync.

  13. thinkweird Says:
    3 December 2008 at 5:50 pm

    Can’t find a Contact form, so…

    Did you modify the comment style? The default miniml theme does not differentiate comments with colors, how did you do that?

  14. admin Says:
    5 December 2008 at 12:50 am

    Just modify the comments.php file and the CSS.

  15. Zman Says:
    5 December 2008 at 7:04 pm

    Yes you can play the m2ts file however you cannot seek or fast forward/reverse the m2ts file in any player that I have tried.

  16. Alex Says:
    19 January 2009 at 11:12 pm

    As i said before this works perfectly, this is the third time i’ve viewed the tutorial, takes about 5mins in total with a quad core and 4gb ram :D thansk again admin :D

  17. Dirt Says:
    23 January 2009 at 11:24 pm

    Hi

    The problem for me being is that in my stream folder there

    are about 102 .mts files like 00000.mts ,mine start from

    00000.mts ,theres no 00001.mts ,to 00115.mts

    The movie it self is spread amongst all these files

    So what do i load now ? I tried just the 00000.mts

    But that didnt work

    Please advise

    Cheers

  18. Dirt Says:
    23 January 2009 at 11:39 pm

    PS

    I also dont have the option bind video to FPS option

    as i see here in the tutorial

    Cheers

  19. admin Says:
    24 January 2009 at 1:47 am

    @Dirt,

    Are you sure there isn’t one big MTS file for the whole film?

    If not you may need to do each one seperately then append each one to make it in to a single file.

    Or there should be a better of doing this by now.

  20. toiday Says:
    26 January 2009 at 2:52 am

    I found an another way to extract the m2ts file without having to purchase isoBuster or DaemonTool pro. I downloaded a live Linux CD. I uses Fedora but any version would work. I use the CD and bootup from the PC with the AVCHD iso file. Mounted the ntfs disk with the AVCHD iso file. Mount the iso file. Then step 1 to get to the m2ts file. Copy the file to the ntfs mount. Boot the pc back to Windows and you have gotten the m2ts.

  21. toiday Says:
    26 January 2009 at 3:29 am

    Everything works. However, after running tsMuxeR, I have a .sub (subtitle) file. I’m not able to add that file into my mkv file with mkvMerge. Is there a way to add subtitle into mkv file?

  22. Rob Kemna (Netherlands) Says:
    4 February 2009 at 2:08 am

    Whoow, it works flawlessly.
    This is a very good manual for converting AVCHD to MKV format.
    I use a Popcorn Hour to play all the great HD-movies on a 50 inch Plasma.
    Before this I didn’t know how to handle AVCHD ISO files, Thanks again!

  23. durandal Says:
    28 March 2009 at 6:21 pm

    It’s work fine great job !
    But the size of the mkv is around 20 Gb
    What is the way to reduce it (around 8-9 Gb) ?

    Thanks

  24. admin Says:
    28 March 2009 at 6:43 pm

    You will have to re-encode the whole video which will take hours.

  25. durandal Says:
    28 March 2009 at 8:35 pm

    OK but with what tool ?

  26. admin Says:
    28 March 2009 at 10:38 pm

    Something like Staxrip or MeGUI should do the job. There are plenty of guides online.

  27. ndotano Says:
    30 March 2009 at 8:28 am

    How to convert 50 fps mts to mkv, i’ve tried several times, result = slowmotion.

  28. admin Says:
    30 March 2009 at 1:41 pm

    When using mkvmerge you will need to set the FPS to 50, or you will need to reencode the original 50fps mts file to a 24fps mkv using Staxrip, MeGUI or a similar application.

  29. Christopher Says:
    21 April 2009 at 2:57 pm

    very nice but what about the subs ? because i cant add the sup file to the merge program

    thanks

  30. Dave Says:
    7 May 2009 at 1:35 pm

    ISObuster does not extract the m2ts for me. It takes only half a second and the file is not in the directory I saved it in. Any pointers?

  31. admin Says:
    7 May 2009 at 5:30 pm

    Are you using the right m2ts file?

  32. Dave Says:
    8 May 2009 at 8:09 am

    I believe so, it’s the file named 00000 if Im not mistaken, also the same thing happens if I try to extract the whole BDC file. I’m puzzled. My dilema is: I have bought a Sony 40W5500 and this can apparantly play AVCHD files streamed from my PC, so I decided to test it but I cant extract the files from the iso.

  33. admin Says:
    8 May 2009 at 12:59 pm

    Does the ISO/Bluray disc have copyright protection on it?

  34. Dave Says:
    11 May 2009 at 1:24 pm

    Problem solved, I used ISObuster, thanks anyway…..

  35. mirko Says:
    21 May 2009 at 9:04 pm

    hello,

    when i get to step 5 and try to demux it gives a message “cannot create file
    D:\.meta access denied. what the … is this?
    every step up to that point was no problem but now i got stuck.
    anyone familiar with this?

    thnx

  36. admin Says:
    22 May 2009 at 6:35 pm

    Is D: writable?

  37. Mirko Says:
    22 May 2009 at 8:15 pm

    what do you mean, should u direct it to an dvdrom?
    ’cause in my case i mean D as in my hard drive.

  38. admin Says:
    22 May 2009 at 8:45 pm

    No, it should be to a hard drive. Not sure what the problem is, I have never come across it or heard of it. I assume that the hard drive isn’t full and you have full write permissions? You could try creating a subfolder and using that as your destination, or trying another drive.

Leave a Reply