Does Pixela's VideoBrowser Re-encode when Joining AVCHD (MTS) Files

I've searched the web for something that can cut and join AVCHD mts files from my canon vixia HF M41 camcorder. Ultimately I'd want video editors like Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere to be able to do smart rendering on AVCHD files but until they are capable, I'd like to be able to use something to combine the several clips and not have it re-encoded.

I tried the TMPGEnc Smart renderer 4 trial which worked great. It costs about $80.

I tried the TSMUXER which seems to work well too but it's not that easy to use for trimmig files (but for joining files it worked very well).

I tried the VideoRedo TV Suite trial but it froze up so I uninstalled it.

Then I tried the Pixela software that came with the camera but I have no way to know if it's re-encoding the full content when it joins files (simple join no transitions or text). It takes longer than TMPGEnc and TSMUXER but the resulting file is about the right size.

Does anyone have a link to a reference that confirms the Pixela VideoBrowser doesn't re-encode when using it to join two or more files?

Sabatical, Thanks for the reply. I did something like that with Pixela's VideoBrowser and I also compared the final size to the combined file created using TSMuxer. The size of the two AVCHD clips I used were 146,656kb and 995,154kb (sum=1,141,810). The resulting file size was 1,113,133 kb from TSMuxer and 1,137,618 from Pixela's VideoBrowser. They're both close so maybe the Video Browser isn't re-encoding (a good sign).

Would re-encoding the clips into the same format (AVCHD) change the actual structure or just re-encode the video content into the same structure? I'll try it out either way.

I came up with a another idea based on comparing audio. Let me know if this seems like a logical way to figure out if something has been re-encoded.

Assuming re-encoding reduces the image quality, if I use a video editor and put one of the original clips into the timeline and then put the combined clips into another track on the timeline and line up the first frame, I can use a subtract (or difference) compositing function in the editing software. The result should be pure black with no artifacts.

So I tried it and it looked black to me. I searched the web for any instructions on how to do this properly but I couldn't find anything specific to this except one post where someone had a utility that could subtract the clips then amplify the result by some multiple (to ensure you can see any miniscule differences). I didn't know how to apply a multiplying factor to the result of differential compositing in Premiere Pro.

XFWS, I didn't have high hopes that I'd get any satisfying reply from either company (just based on my dealings with tech support in general). I prefer seeing a consensus from multiple sources in forums.

Thanks for everyone's inputs.