Unable to play H264 AVC .mp4 in Quicktime Player 10

[richard.mac]

I am wondering why I can't play an H264 AVC .mp4 in Quicktime Player 10. Upon opening Quicktime just says 'Converting'.

I mean, I just assumed Quicktime was very good at playing H264 in mp4, and it would just play fine.

The video plays fine in VLC understandably, here are the codec details.



I was able to play this in Quicktime Player after following https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=14725614#post14725614 and running the below command with ffmpeg from http://ffmpegmac.net

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy test.mp4

When playing 'test.mp4' in VLC player it has exactly the same codecs as the screenshot above, which is puzzling me.

Why can't Quicktime play this file natively?

 

[MisterMe]

Your video is MPEG-4 AVC Part 10, commonly known as AVCHD. It is a highly compressed format that has been traditionally used in applications of limited storage capacity.

Old MPEG-4 and the newer H.264/AAC are supported by the QuickTime frameworks out of the box. AFAIK, AVCHD has always required an optional codec. Quicktime 7 supports optional codecs; QuickTime X does not. I can only speculate about Apple's reasons for this decision. However, it does give you reason to keep a copy of the QuickTime Player [7].

 

[richard.mac]

Ah, thanks for the information MisterMe. Are you able to brief me on what exactly the command did? Convert from H.264 AVC to just H.264? Confusing.

I see now Quicktime X player lists the Format as H.264/AAC. But I wonder why VLC still lists it as MPEG-4 AVC Part 10?

 

[Dave Braine]

Quicktime just says 'Converting'.

It will play after it's converted, and then you can save the converted version and then it will play straight off next time.