My daughter needed to make a presentation for a school project using PowerPoint and needed to embed some video of her at some of the track meets she competed in. I recorded the vido using my Sony HD video cam, that saves the files in a .mts format.

When I tried to insert the .mts files into PowerPOint, it was a not og - format not recognized. So I needed a way to convert the .mts files to a more common format, like .avi or .mpg.

After about an hour's worth of research and two abortive attempts, I located a free program that doesn precisely that - converts .mts to other formats (specifically .mpg, which was the one I'd settled on).

It's by by Kyote Soft. Actullly, they make two. Look in the left hand navigation under Video Tools. I used Free Video Converter (version 2.8 as of this post), but the Free HD Converter (version 1.7 as of this post) also claims to do .mts conversions.

The clips I converted were pretty short, but it did the job quickly and easily.....Videos converted and inserted in the presentation, presentation saved to USB stick, and done.