The VideoLAN Forums

Hi everyone,

It seems that the byte stream format for H264 is not supported by VLC (up to 2.0.1). You know, the one where you don't have a container like 3GP or AVI, but just the raw H264 stream. Where the NAL units are preceded by the fixed code 0x00000001 in stead of the NAL unit length.

I would really appreciate if that could be implemented. I seems strange to me that it does not already work, because ffmpeg does not have a problem with it at all.

I work in the field of video file recovery, and I often salvage just some H264 streams that I convert to the byte stream format. I have always recommended VLC to my clients as 'the player that can do it all', and I would hate to have to return to ffplay!

I've included a link to a small file (500 kB), for testing:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7877509/VLC_raw_H264_test.264

If anyone could have a look at it, that would be great!

Thanks so much.

Rename it to .h264

Omg! That actually worked!

I have been under the impression for years that VLC did not do much with extensions, but checked the file contents to see what the format is... I guess that would still be the optimal solution for me, but nevertheless, I'm happy.

Thanks very much, this has helped me a lot!

Yeah, the current solution isn't very pretty.