Video is one of the most popular formats of entertainment nowadays. One of the primary requirements for video is quality, and video quality is mainly determined by resolution. However, the higher resolution of the video leads to a larger video size. To meet the daily increased demand for better video quality, video codec evolves significantly lately, from H.264 AVC to H.265 HEVC and now H.266 VVC.
But a new video codec will take years of time to become prevalent. H.264 was first released in 2003, and it became popular in about the early 2010s. As the successor to H.264, the first version of H.265 came out around 2013, and it is now widely adopted by video shooting devices including iPhone, Android phone, GoPro, 360-degree video camera, and so forth, because of the 25% to 50% higher compression rate than H.264 AVC. H.265 is also known as HEVC, ie. High-Efficiency Video Coding. H.265 currently is the most commonly used video codec for Ultra HD videos as well as videos with high FPS, such as 1080P 240FPS video for slow motion, 2.7K and 4K 120 FPS video, and more.
Although video in H.265 can save much more space than H.264, there are a lot of problems with H.265 HEVC videos, including format incompatible issues, playback lagging, split video, green and pink screen, no audio during playback, etc. Most of these problems can be solved by converting H.265 to H.264 with a good converter on a computer.
What makes a good free H.265 to H.264 converter? It should be noticed that not all the free video converters provided on the Internet are able to help you get the job done smoothly. Most of the HEVC videos are in 4K, some are even in 5K and 8K, therefore, superb decoding and encoding engine of the converter is required to process these UHD videos. That means you need at least a 4K video converter for converting H.265 video to H.264.
For a short H.265 video with small file size, you can use an online converter. Because it won’t take a long time to upload the small H.265 video to an online tool for converting as well as to download the converted file on the computer. But H.265 video in large size is not recommended to be converted online. You will feel painful to just upload it to the website. Besides, utmost online sites limit the size of the uploaded file to 500MB or 1GB. Also, some of the free online converters will add watermarks to the output videos if you don’t subscribe. You should pay attention to this before converting. If you find the online tool troublesome, you can check the desktop H.265 to H.264 converter below.
One of the top free desktop converters for HEVC 4K video is WinX Video Converter, which supports over 400 types of video and audio codecs including but not limited to HEVC, H.264, AV1, VP9/8, MP4, MKV, MOV… And it allows you to convert HEVC videos from any source be it GoPro, iPhone, Camcorder, DJI, Android phone, Dashcam, Surveillance camera, etc.
With the enhancement of NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and DXVA hardware acceleration, it serves you a fast video conversion of H.265 to H.264. What you need to do is to tick the box before Intel, nVIDIA, AMD on the conversion interface. Unlike the choice of either speed or quality provided by many converters, the GPU-acceleration operation has no side effect on video quality. You can enjoy the blazing fast conversion speed without any loss of quality.
What’s more, even a newbie will accommodate himself in a second thanks to the automatic step guides of WinX Video Converter. You can follow below three steps to convert an H.265 file to H.264.
Step 1. Add an H.265 file by clicking the “Video” icon on the main UI or just a drag-and-drop to the program.
Step 2. Next, a window will pop up to let you select the output format accordingly. Here in “General Profiles”, you can choose MP4 or MOV with the “h264+acc” codec. We recommend you choose MP4 as the output format because it’s the most compatible format for now.
Step 3. After choosing, you can just click the big RUN button to start the H.265 to H.264 work.
It’s very straightforward and easy, right?
Yet, apart from converting H.265 and other videos, it offers additional features for professional users to adjust video ratio, resolution, frame rate, audio channel, etc. And WinX Video Converter can help you cut & trim, crop & resize video, compress & reduce video file size, add hardcode subtitles, adjust volume, make a slideshow video, and more. A simple video editing tool is a built-in WinX Video Converter.
It should be noticed that since HEVC has a higher compression rate than AVC codec when you convert H.265 video to H.264 without changing any other parameters, the size would become larger after conversion. If you want to reduce the file size, you’d better choose a lower resolution.
