Unable to play AVCHD video from camcorder
I have a camcorder from about 2009 that records AVCHD / BDAV media onto blu-ray or SD. Here is an example file:
https://gekk.info/videos/avchd-hitachi/00002.m2ts
In VLC 3.0.12 on my Windows 10 machine, it plays audio but no video. I checked with several other people who reported the same, including one who was on Linux (don't have details.) What's strange about this is that it doesn't throw an error, nor does it fail to identify a video track - the codec info shows a video stream, but VLC doesn't even switch into video layout, it stays in library view and plays the audio alone.
This problem is not limited to VLC, many programs fail to read this file, but since this media is intended for playback in a normal BD player, I have to assume it's not bizarre, corrupt, or incorrectly encoded. It does in fact work in Adobe Premiere and something called VideoRedo that a friend tried, so I know the video data is intact.
Since the commercial apps I've tried work and the free / open source ones I've tried don't, I suspect this is an issue in a single library they're all using, ffmpeg / libavcodec perhaps. Someone did try reencoding it with ffmpeg and got a host of errors, and Handbrake just says it can't decode it, and I think that's ffmpeg based as well, so I kinda suspect this is an ffmpeg problem.
The reason I'm opening this as a VLC ticket is twofold: a) I would like to confirm whether the codec in use here is a VLC component or an external library. If the latter, please let me know which project I should take this up with.
b) It seems like VLC is not taking the right action in this situation. It's acting like there's no video, yet the codec tab is finding a video track. Shouldn't that disagreement of facts produce an error e.g. "a video track was found that cannot be decoded"?