Sony is such a poor software maker. First off, they did not have software to edit the AVCHD stuff that comes out of their HD Camcorders. I heard that Sony Vegas now supports AVCHD editing. Based on my experience with all the crap I got from Sony’s software division, I would not pay money to buy it. How many of you had bad experience with bundled software that comes with Sony Vaio laptops or Sony computers? I had many and that is how started installingclean Windows XP on all my computers. All outsourced crap I think.

This is another one. The tools come with Sony HDR-SR1 can convert AVCHD to mpg files. The problem is, it won’t play in Windows Media player. There is a ton of mpg files on my hard drive from other tools, mostly converted from AVI files and they play in WMP just fine. After almost 6 months of having this camcorder, I am still frustrated.

http://www.ulead.com/vs/runme.htm

If you have Camcorders like Sony HDR-SR1 and newer models you may want to look at this one.

I purchased this item from Circuit City. The camcorder is fine. Once you capture video, there is not much you can do with the video. There are no software available today to edit the AVCHD format used by this camcorder. Even the Sony Vegas software will start supporting this format only in 2007 summer.

I tried almost all video editing software to open the files produced by this camcorder without success. If you want to share videos captured today with someone else, use some other camcorder.

The above is the review I tried to submit on Circuit City web site. I expected it to fail because I did not give it a good rating. So I had it copied to my clip board, a precaution I usually take when I use web browsers. As expected, I got an error from the Circuit City web site saying it could not save my entry because of an unexpected error. Well, I though let me post it here.

Other things I want to add here is that, this camcorder does not have a firewire iLink interface. If you are planning to use a video capture device that captures video through iLink, then you cannot use that device. Cyberlink PowerEncoder MPEG 4 AVC edition software supports capture through FireWire port only. I have to search for a video capture device that supports capturing through HDMI because this camera supports HDMI. I am guessing that the camera is good for early adopters.

I recently purchased the new Sony HDR-SR1 camcorder from Sony. It comes with a software installation disk. This is the only software that can handle the format used by this camcorder – AVCHD. This software is not compatible with Windows Vista. There is a bunch tools the installer will install on your system. Many of them will install fine. Sonic UDF reader will outright fail to install. Sony handycam utility will install without any problem but will not function. When you try to run, an empty message box with one button that says nothing will popup.

I have no clue what this message box is trying to tell me. I am going back to Windows XP to do my camcorder stuff – there is nothing much you can do with AVCHD at this point, but just upload it to your PC – and then come back to Vista for other things because I like to work on Vista.

See one of my earlier post on this subject for more details.