AVC realtime editing is good, as is native AVC TS streaming
@Jolyon Ralph , while its true there were problems with the software side of AVC editing inside Linux you seemed to have used?.
thats my most basic point, a cheap mass produced realtime AVC Encoder/Decoder SOC (System On a Chip) realtime Hardware encoding/decoding to H@L4.1 inside every single new device is a very good thing to have TODAY, then any interfacing Software can then just get on with the real job of cutting and joining your AVC edits passing off the hard work of decoding/reEncoding to any genericAVC SOC you might have available.
lets see some mass produced AVC SOC in all these new low power devices so others dont have to go through your pain.....
BTW, you might not know it but searching on AVCHD native "MTS" and "M2TS" gets you far more information for these and other current AVC/H.264/AVCHD DV recorders and how to edit their generic AVC/H.264 files.
in your case and your HDC-SD9 ,check out Kdenlive as "shadow" has posted a series of patches to FFmpeg to make the AVC SD9 fully supported now, thats progress for you in linux, hope it helps.
and check out the Doom9 threads were all the serious x86 video devs hang out and post their free wares
remember AVC is a very good thing, it even have an offiaicl lossless mode that profession grade freware x264 endoder can produce.
remember, its the software thats let you down so far, not the AVC codec, we NEED these mass produced realtime hardware AVC encoders/decoder SOC portable and static low power devices to lighten the editing load, so make them and we will come.
http://www.kdenlive.org/video-editor/panasonic-hdc-sd9
http://www.kdenlive.org/forum/avchd-playback-and-editing
http://www.kdenlive.org/video-editor