I was appointed to take charge of this video site recently. Under a fact that I knew little about the video field before, I have to do something to get into this industry as fast as possible. I hung out at Yahoo Answers yesterday (September 10, 2013) and came across a question about how to convert and play a H264 file on computer and DVD with a sample H264 file download link attached.

Some of you may have known about video formats including 264, H.264 and H264. But there must be people like me who know little or have never heard of these terms. Anyway, the first thing entering my mind was "What is H264" when I read that question. Next questions are how to play/watch H264 files and convert H264 to MP4, AVI or another popular video format like that guy asked. Well, all these will be discussed in this post. I am not an expert. But I spent several hours on it last afternoon and after reading this post, you will at least be able to convert H264 to MP4/AVI and play the H264 files on PC, DVD or other devices.

What is H.264 (.H264)

H.264, together with MPEG-4 Part 10 and AVC, is a standard for video compression/codec and widely used for high quality (HD) video recording, compression and distribution. H.264 codec mostly relates to Blu-ray encoding and decoding and all BD players are required to support H.264 decoding. Other video/source types like streaming videos from YouTube, Vimeo, etc, iTunes store, Adobe Flash PLayer and HDTV broadcasts support H.264 as well.

Among my findings (primarily from the YA asker), there are actually video files come in .H264 format apart from H.264. Video format .H264 is not that common, but DVR (Digital Video Recorder, such as Swann) footage files come in .H264 in many cases.

If you want to create H.264 files yourself, you can use rippers like Nero Recode 2 (NeroDigital AVC), Apple Quicktime and X264 (open source).

How to play H264 files

Publicly recommended H264 player programs include DAPlayer, MediaPlayerLite, VLC, Apple QuickTime, and other mainstream video players with ffdshow DirectShow filter installed (separately). Also, Xbox 360 and PSP are supposed to support H.264. But that does not work in my case. I am testing a .H264 file instead of H.264. If you guys ever tested and found the mentioned program worked, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Badfishlbc introduced a .H264 video player for playing .H264 files from Swann DVR at cctvforum. But that does not work in my case, either.

Anyway, I received no luck after a lot of installations yesterday. In the very end, I astonishedly found a workaround to play the H264 file on my computer by converting H264 file to MP4 or AVI with an amazing tool: YAMB. It is free, light, easy and fast!

Next, I will tell you how to use free YAMB to convert H264 to MP4 or AVI. Fairly simple!

How to convert H264 to MP4, AVI, etc.

First click to download YAMB.

The installation file is less than 2 M. Double-click the downloaded .exe file to install.

Step 1: Launch YAMB.

Step 2: Add your H.264 or H264 file to YAMB.

Click "Add" button on the default "Mux" tab to open and add your H.264 or H264 file. You will find the "Output" field turns to MP4 immediately.

Set the "Files of type" as "All supported Files (*.*)" if your H264 file does not display on the "Open" window.

Step 3: Click "Mux" button and start the H264 to MP4 conversion.

In seconds (or longer, depends on the source file size), the conversion will be complete. By checking the Yamb log as the screenshot shows below, you will know the muxing finished.

Check the results

Switch to the output folder (under the same folder as the source), you will find the MP4 version displayed.

Double-click the converted MP4 file to open with the default video player program on your PC. Here I was playing with Windows Media Player.

Now we have successfully converted H.264 (.H264) to MP4. By manually changing the file extension as ".AVI" or "MOV", it is also possible to convert .H264 to AVI or another format for playing on Win, Mac, DVD, iPhone, iPod, iPad, etc. Also, you can burn .H264/H.264 files into DVD or BD discs by using a DVD/BD creator program (after the h264-to-avi or h264-to-mp4 conversion).

More suprises!

If you want a more powerful tool to crop videos, add 3D effects, download YouTube videos or burn the h264 video files to DVD, you can try Video Ultimate converter below.