I got a Creative Vado HD camera for Christmas from Jenn and have been messing around a bit with it. I like the recording quality, but I found in Windows Vista you have to install an H.264 codec in order to get the videos to play in Windows Media Player. (In Windows 7 they provide an H.264 codec for Windows Media Player so you don’t have to install anything else.)

While playback is fine and dandy, I’m not really interested in editing the videos I take with the camera in the simplistic editor they provide. I suppose if I just zapped something really quick to jam up on YouTube that’d be great, but I find I end up with several clips where I need to trim the start/end on them, maybe crossfade them into each other - nothing really major, but more than the little app offers. I have Sony Vegas to do my video editing and it works great.

Except on H.264.

See, Windows does not come with a codec that Sony Vegas can use to edit these files. You can get the audio, but not the video. Really dumb, and dumber still that Sony didn’t pre-package one just in case, particularly since H.264 is so popular.

The answer: x264vfw - a free, open-source Video for Windows H.264 codec.

Once you install x264vfw - three clicks, tops - magically everything works the way you want it to. Playback in Windows Media Player, editing in Sony Vegas… fantastic.

Note that I have seen other solutions for this posted elsewhere encouraging you to install the whole K-Lite Mega Codec Pack and everything that comes with it. That’s overkill. You only need a VFW (Video for Windows) H.264 codec, and K-Lite uses x264vfw internally anyway. I’m a fan of only installing the things you absolutely have to, and just x264vfw will take care of it.

UPDATE 1/4/2010: This appears to have broken in Sony Vegas 10. I had it working in Vegas 9 and for various reasons upgraded to Vegas 10 and now it doesn’t work. It appears that the recommendation in the Sony Vegas knowledge base is to use Windows Live Movie Maker to convert the video to a different format (since Windows can read/play it but Vegas can’t). For that purpose, I created a new custom setting in Windows Live Movie Maker with the following values:

• Width: 1280
• Height: 720
• Bit rate: 8500
• Frame rate: 30
• Audio format: 192kbps, 48kHz, stereo

The width, height, and frame rate match the Vado HD video. The other values are just slightly higher quality than the Vado so you won’t lose too much quality in the conversion. Doing a few tests, I don’t really notice a difference in the source and converted materials.

After conversion, Sony Vegas easily reads the files and you can edit them as expected.

Personally, I think it’s pretty lame that Windows Live Movie Maker can read these files but a higher-end program like Vegas can’t. You would think Vegas would take advantage of the same set of codecs WLMM does… but apparently not.