open-source or free AVCHD conversion to image sequence I am looking for a good and free option to convert AVCHD (Full-HD from a Panasonic Lumix GH1) to image sequences. I am currently using Blender but it is cumbersome in that it only allows me to convert the videos if I disable the preview - should the preview be open in my workspace, Blender halts for about 1-2 mins until it shows a preview image - any further click on the preview halts it again.

It can very well be a command line tool (I am willing to craft the command line options myself if needed). 

The output images can be any common format (PNG, JPG, even TIFF). The conversion to image sequences is asked for because Blender (that I use as editing software) has no problems with image sequences and other formats but AVCHD seems to still be painful.

Thanks!
Wonderful ffmpeg command line utility is the solution. Just check their documentation, but something like the following will probably work for your case:

ffmpeg -i video.mts video%05d.png


This will take your video, and create video00001.png, video00002.png... files in the same folder.

You can find a lot of guides for ffmpeg, or ask here for a specific soltion. We can try to figure out.