Good sign for the hardware vendors and bad for the film studios? The high definition AVCHD format is being adopted by the Hong Kong pirated copies producers, as is used for creating Blu-ray imitations of feature films. The AVCHD format is supported by Sony PlayStation 3 console, as well as some Blu-ray players (although not all of them). It’s a good sign for hardware vendors as piracy is usually the result of a unbalanced supply vs. demand on the market. This means that the high definition formats have penetrated the market with suffiecient volumes, so that the pirated copies produces see it as a potential market. The film studios are obviously seeing the same phenomena with every video format generation.

AVCHD is a High Definition video format that basically is Blu-ray content recorded on regular DVD media. It can deliver real high definition video at the real HD resolutions (usually 720p), although the used bitrate is lower which leads to lesser image quality in comparison to Blu-ray. The quality however is obviously better than on regular DVDs and can look great on a HD television. If you slip an AVCHD disc to a PlayStation 3 it will play just like a DVD and it can also containt subtitles. The pirates however play it very dirty as they place their AVCHD copies of Blu-ray films in characteristic blue jewel cases and even place hologram stickers of them to make them look like authentic Blu-rays. The thing is however that not all Blu-ray players are AVCHD compatible.

AVCHD discs are actually simple to author by anyone who has standard compliant video material available. tsMuxer is a free and easy to use software for the job, and the discs are recorded using a regular DVD-RW drive. See our guide for step-by-step instructions: Click here

Source: Tietokone.fi ( in Finnish only)