What is a .264 file?
A .264 file is a raw H.264 (AVC) video elementary stream, without a container.
- Did you know
- The number in .264 comes from the ITU-T’s H-series of standards: it is the direct descendant of H.261, the 1988 videoconferencing codec that established the basic design still used by video compression today.
- H.264 is jointly maintained by the ITU-T (which calls it H.264) and ISO/IEC MPEG (which calls it MPEG-4 Part 10, or AVC), so the two specifications share identical technical content.
- AVCHD, the camcorder recording format Sony and Panasonic introduced in 2006, is built around H.264 video, which put the codec into millions of consumer video cameras.
- A raw .264 elementary stream carries only the coded video, with no timing, audio or metadata, so it usually needs muxing into a container such as MP4 before most players will touch it.
- H.264 was developed by the Joint Video Team, a collaboration between MPEG and the ITU-T’s Video Coding Experts Group.
- What Analyser shows you
- Read the container, codec, resolution, and frame rate of MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI, and WebM video, step through frames, and extract the audio track. Raw H.264/H.265 elementary streams (.h264/.265) are remuxed to MP4 in-browser so they play too.
- Open a .264 file
- Drag a .264 file onto the Analyser home page (or tap to pick one). It opens entirely in your browser - nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and it works offline once installed.