Comments

farss wrote on 1/5/2009, 4:05 AM
As far as I can tell as there's no exact definition of either it's kind of impossible to say what the exact difference is. In fact there doesn't appear to be any as AVCHD also supports SD. Wikipedia has a fairly good explaination.

Bob.
blink3times wrote on 1/5/2009, 4:44 AM
Yeah... Thanks Bob.

I did have a look through that and it doesn't really describe any difference. In fact wikipedia tends to use the terms "avc" and "avchd" interchangeably.

From what it says AVC can be used in SD and HD so I always figured the "HD" merely described "high definition"

"AVCHD" also seems to contain an audio track of some sort as denoted by the definition "AVCHD (Audio and Video Compression for High Definition)"
while "AVC" is not specific in that area

If you look at the vegas Blu ray templates as well it seems to point to an audio/no audio differentiation as well.

So I'm guessing here but I'm thinking the only real difference is much like M2T and M2V (a mpg video stream without audio vs a mpog stream with transport info.
Xander wrote on 1/5/2009, 6:55 AM
AVC stands for Advanced Video Codec, in particular, MPEG-4 Part 10: AVC/H.264. This is the video compression codec ,i.e. the algorithm used to compress the video signal.

AVCHD is a high-definition and standard-definition recording format for use in digital tapeless camcorders. AVCHD refers to a set of standard video and audio parameters that are placed into a transport stream container. This allows for greater interoperability between manufacturers. It is more of a 'branding' name than anything else. It allows MPEG-4/AVC video at various bitrates and resolutions (SD or HD) and both AC-3 audio (2.0/5.1) and Linear PCM audio.

HDV is a high definition recording format which uses miniDV/DVC tapes. It is similar to the above, except that it was more restricted, i.e. MPEG-2 video (HD only) with Mpeg-Layer 2 audio.

Hope the above helps.