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Hey guys, I need some urgent help from you all. It is Windows Vista with Windows Media Player 11. Whenever I try playing few videos from my external HDD, every time I receive the following error:
“You have to install some codecs like PowerDVD H.264 Codec to play the H.264 video files.”
I tried searching for this codec on internet but dint found any. Can anyone from here provide me some more info about this? Many thanks.
I don’t know much about that error message or codec but I do know that installing FFDShow will fix the problem for sure. You can download the same from here http://www.free-codecs.com/download/FFDShow.htm. Once downloaded restart the system for better results and see if you still get the problem while playing any video files.
Your help appreciated friend. As per your suggestion I downloaded and installed FFDShow and restarted the system but still am not able to play those H.264 video in Windows media Player or QuickTime either. Only iTunes is able to play them comfortably.
What is the actual problem? What kind of codec does it requires?
What is the best professional/production quality H.264 decoder for Windows XP. We hav eour own player, but if it works with Windows Media player, it hsould work with out player. We are looking for alternate solutions to the K-lite FDShow suite. I found one called Elecard. Is this one good? I know that Apple's H.264 codec is very good, but it seems to be locked to usage with Quicktime or Quicktime API apps? Trying to find the best pro-quality H.264 decoder to use for digital media players. These players need to play for months, cleanly. Any suggestions would be appreciated?
I have an avi, installed ffdshow, made sure h264 was ticked in the DVD menu, tried using both of the options there, I am using WMP11 and it still gives me the "codec not found" error message. It plays in Quicktime but I don't use quicktime and an avi wont import to itunes obviously. It seems like it should work, but in practice it doesn't. Help?
rafi, I think that it's overcomplicated since most conversations about codecs start at a low level...I've figured out a little on my own, but still get lost pretty quick.
There are some common "containers formats", like AVI, MP4 and MKV. There are varying capabilities with each, and then each OS has varying levels of support for each.
Inside these containers you will find video and audio formats, like the ever-popular h.264 for video, or one of mp3, aac, ac3, dts for audio (each with different levels of audio capability and quality).
You can find out what's inside a container using mediainfo or g-spot (just google em), and then GOM or VLC are great, free players. VLC is interesting in that it has all the codecs that it uses , built-in, so you dont have to get a codec, or codec-pack to view (as you would in WMP, since that is a pretty "dumb" player for anything other than native window video/audio).
Once you get through the basics, however, there is still some tweaking required, esp if you are not willing to buy something (if you buy powerdvd or windvd, many of the issues here just go away and you don't have to know much about codecs or containers). Also, if you have, say, powerdvd, the codecs that are installed with that program will work in WMP, which just seems like magic if you don't understand how that works.
One last thing about codec packs. They are typically pretty bulky, and take time during startup on your machine (making it a bit slower), not to mention sometimes they can fight other drivers or applications used in audio and video presentation. So, I have found it best to stick with a couple common formats, and if you just really want something, convert it from a non-typical format to some common format with handbrake, or something similar (handbrake is a transcoder so that you can convert 1 video format to another).
Anyway, hope some of that helps,
Beanbrown