x264 is a free library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams.To decode use a recent build of FFDShow or a player that supports H.264 internally – like MPlayer.

There are few interesting frontends for Windows: MPlayerUI, MPlayer Frontend) and VLC (VideoLAN Client).

- VFW and installer were removed from auto update, VFW is outdated. However, you may try the Leiming’s x264 GUI.
- Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, AVISynth and DGIndex are required to use with MeGUI but NOT included.
Encoder features :
- CAVLC/CABAC
- Multi-references
- Intra: all macroblock types (16×16, 8×8, and 4×4 with all predictions)
- Inter P: all partitions (from 16×16 down to 4×4)
- Inter B: partitions from 16×16 down to 8×8 (including skip/direct)
- Ratecontrol: constant quantizer, single or multipass ABR, optional
- Scene cut detection
- Adaptive B-frame placement
- B-frames as references / arbitrary frame order
- 8×8 and 4×4 adaptive spatial transform
- Lossless mode
- Custom quantization matrices
- Parallel encoding of multiple slices

Advanced settings :
- Enabling Cabac: approximately 10% bitrate reduction
- Enabling De-blocking Filter: smooths out visible blocks
- x264 doesn’t support the error-resilience features of baseline

Changes from x264 Video Codec rev. 668 to x264 rev. 675 :
- (r675) fix some integer overflows. now vbv size can exceed 2 Gbit.
- (r674) allow –vbv-init to take absolute values (in kbit)
- (r673) remove a bashism
- (r672) reorder headers so that largefile support
- (r671) regression in r669: broke saving of configure args
- (r670) regression in r669: –enable-shared should imply –enable-pic
- (r669) Add a –host flag to allow overriding config.guess
- Normalize any host triplet into a quadruplet via config.sub.
- Move option parsing before any use of architecture information.
- (r668) Update config.guess.

x264 Video Codec

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