Hi Daniel,
thanks for your in depth answer!
The thing is: Windows Media Player can playback the files! So the codec is actually installed! So the problem must be somewhere else.
I will try to sum up what we’ve found out:
- We know that JUCE wraps OS capabilities in order to play back video files
- I think Windows provides to approaches for media playback: the first is Direct Show (older/outdated) and the second is “Windows Media Foundation” (current).
- Unfortunatly JUCE uses Direct Show.
- Windows Media Player uses Windows Media Foundation, therefore it can playback h264 files.
So my question to the JUCE developers: is it realistic to hope, that JUCE provides playback via Windows Media Foundation in the near furture? I feel i am not the only person struggling with this. There are several threads in this forum that seem to be somewhat related (some are really old). To me this feels like something pretty basic just does not work in JUCE as expected. Of course it would be the nicest solution if this gets fixed. But i can imagine, tha this is just not a priority for the JUCE Team.
Has someone already tried to modify the Video Component so it uses Windows Media Foundation? Maybe someone found a solution but never mentioned it in the forums.
Are there any suggestions for a workaround?
Again: installing third party stuff is not an option. Converting all of our files neither 
Clemens