In media produce, we often use x264 to encode videos. The output files have .264 extentions, which are raw .264 files. But these files can usually NOT be able to play by using any of players.
This is because we miss a DirectShow source filter to indentify the raw .264 streams and pass the stream to H.264 decoders. (CoreAVC, FFMpeg, etc.)
I searched 264 source filters on the web for a long time but nothing found. I even went to doom9 forum for help, only found a lot of people confused with this issue but there were no good solutions.
A common solution is to mux the raw 264 file into mp4 format, but this can only be used when the video encoding is fully completed. But often we need is to preview the beginning of a .264 file while the video is still in processing.
I remembered that I used to play the .264 files sucessfully. That’s on my old computer. But my old computer was sold when I was graduate from the university. Fortunately I kept the hard disk. I tried to boot up the operation system in the hard disk with my father’s computer but failed. It was because my father’s computer do not support AHCI mode.
Finally I used an AHCI compatible computer to boot into my old system. I opened a .264 file with windows media player and launched Process Explorer to list the DLL files loaded by the process. I found a file named NDParser.ax, which was in the C:\Program Files\Nero7.5\DSFilter directory.
That means Nero DirectShow Filters can produce raw .264 files. In the other word, NDParser.ax contains a raw .264 source filter.
I copied the files in the DSFilter directory to another computer and run regsvr32 to register the NDParser.ax. Then the .264 file became playable! Notice that FFMpeg decoder seems not working in decoding the stream in this situation, CoreAVC is suggested.
You can download Nero DirectShow Filters by clicking here. The copyright of these files is belong to Nero Inc.