Here is a trick for dramatically improving AVCHD / MTS files using VLC. I was getting a lot of skipping on my macbook and now I have buttery smooth playback.
Thanks to this post on the Photography Within blog, I’ve now found a trick that enables VLC to play these files very smoothly – you just have to change one setting:
Go to Tools > Preferences
In the lower left of the box click the checkbox “Show settings – All”
Then go to Input & Codecs > Other Codecs > FFmpeg and look for the option called “Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding”
Change it from “none” to “all”
Restart VLC