I've got Windows 7, which I'm told is meant to support AVCHD videos out of the box. Unfortunately, when I play my videos in Windows Media Player (version 12), I get sound but no picture.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Unfortunately there are many different ways of encoding the videos to get AVCHD (or equivalent) but WMP is somewhat picky about which ones it actually plays. I've had two files that ostensibly were created by the same program, with almost exactly the same settings, one file an MP4 video and another an AVI and only the MP4 played.
I worked around it by installing the DivX Codec Pack and the whole world of HD video suddenly "just worked."
You don't need to install the DivX Player or any other rubbish, just install the codec only and Windows Media Player is then able to play just about anything you could want.
On ninite.com you can download and install super easily the k-lite codec pack. With that codec pack you can see anything. Ghosts included :)