Loading ...Free AVCHD Players
When buying a HD Sony Handycam, a HD Canon Vixia, a HD Panasonic, a HD JVC or any other HD camcorder you’ll require a AVCHD player to view the HD content on your computer. All the big HD camcorder brands (Sony, Canon, JVC and Panasonic) bundle their offerings with their own proprietery software. This software is usually limited and not easy to use because of the limited development cycle of AVCHD players and AVCHD editors as the technology is brand new.
There are a number of software development companies offering Free AVCHD players. These AVCHD players are listed below. If you come accross any other Free AVCHD players not listed, please add a comment with a brief discription and I’ll add it to the list.
Free AVCHD players:
BSPlayer AVCHD player
What we like:
- The BSPlayer AVCHD player is a classy act. It comes with a variety of features and has a genuinly intuitive interface
- It is a relatively small download at 10.22Mb
- It offers a variety of skins to choose from
- It has a forum section with a decent number of threads and replies to help you customize the player to suit your needs
- It requires low RAM and CPU usage.
- Runs on multiple platforms
What we dislike:
- When downloading the free version of the BSPlayer AVCHD player there are three options varying in size between 10Mb and 50Mb. There is no telling what the difference is between these three if you’re not a software developer for BSPlayer understanding their lingo.
- When selecting to download the BSPlayer AVCHD player you need to confirm and re-confirm your desire to download, wasn’t the first confirmation enough…
- It has a Pro version which is where these guys make their money from, meaning the Free AVCHD Player will probably have severe limitations.
Free BS.Player download (download now)
From the developer:
“World’s most popular software multimedia playerEver since the very beginning in the year 2000, the BS.PlayerTM has been one of the world’s most popular video player. It is popular for many reasons, one however should be pointed out: BS.PlayerTM is the first software movie player ever to enable its users to focus on watching the movie instead of dealing with poor computer capabilities or running around looking for a proper setting and codec. Also, it has very low CPU and RAM requirements. ”
BSPlayer AVCHD player screenshots:
VideoLAN – VLC media player
What we like:
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- VideoLAN VLC media player is Open Source
- It is Free
- Light weight and doesn’t take over your entire computer wanting to control every multimedia file there ever was
- VideoLAN VLC Media Player supports multiple platforms including Windows, Apple OS, Linux and more
- Continual development by worldwide open source developers
- Does a great job of playing AVCHD files on your computer.
- WithVideoLAN VLC media player there is no need to download additional codecs for AVCHD files to play.
- VideoLAN VLC Media player is a 16mb download for Windows.
What the developers have to say:
“About VLC media player
VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
It doesn’t need any external codec or program to work.”
VideoLAN VLC media player Screenshots:
Oxygen AVCHD Player by Mirillis
What we like:
- These guys have take the Oxygen AVCHD player form development to version 1 in record time.
- The Oxygen AVCHD player is free
- The download size for the lite Oxygen AVCHD player is only 684kb
- It has a simple yet stylish user interface.
- It allows you to play AVCHD streams in real time on your PC.
- The Oxygen AVCHD player is highly optimised for multi core processors allowing it to play up to 24Mbps streams in real time.
- The Oxygen AVCHD player was built with AVCHD in mind, it doesn’t offer other frills and fuss, just what you need, no less, no more, thus the Oxygen Player is fully compliant with AVCHD specification in terms of audio and video decoding.
- Oxygen Player is also capable to decode MPEG-2 TS broadcast streams with video encoded in H.264.
What we dislike:
- If you don’t already have a copy of the Oxygen AVCHD Player by Mirillis you’re probably not going to get one as The Mirillis website has been suspended because of an intellectual properties dispute.
- Only suported Windows Xp.
If you know of any other free AVCHD players please write a comment so that we can include them in this section.
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(10 votes, average: 3.90 out of 5)
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Reader Comments
Bs.player requires downloading additional codec after installation (ffdshow) for decoding avchd. I wonder how they can charge for this in pro version? If bs player is on the list then there should be many other players that use ffdshow filters. Bs player gives only GUI, and this is not so intuitive.VLC and Oxygen AVCHD PLayer are the top players. But VLC has problems with some streams sometimes. Oxygen plays everything and faster.2 positions in “what we dislike” of oxygen are wrong a little bit
1) website is coming back and they come back with new faster player (they claim to be 30-40% faster than old player). still free for avchd playback (but with no seek mode ehh again)2) it is for xp and vista windows. not xp only. they are going to develop it on mac too. but i dont know when.my source: mail from mirillis.i use only oxygen avchd player 1.2. i use also VLC but for other things, not for avchd playback.
Do any of these players also support AVCHD Lite, which some of the smallest cameras are now using–specificially the DMC-TS1 waterproof camera?
Oxygen is now Splash Lite player (still free). It plays AVCHD files amazingly well even on less than high performance systems. After getting a new Sony camera recently, i was disappointed that I couldn’t play my movies on my computer. I tried a few different programs including VLC. Nothing worked until Splash. I highly recommend it. www.mirillis.com