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The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.
You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site.
We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.
Trying to help someone who has upgraded to Catalina, but cannot play videos that are created with the H.264/AAC format. The videos work on other Macs running Catalina, so it's not the video itself. Will this require re-installing the entire Catalina OS, since QuickTime is installed with it, or is there some way to reinstall QuickTime by itself. I'm thinking some codec is missing.
MacBook Pro 15”, macOS 10.15
Hey there Patrick Besong,
Great job with helping your friend on this issue of QuickTime not playing videos with the H.264 format. Let's look into what this could be, and see what can be done to fix it.
At this time, let's go ahead and back up the Mac and then reinstall macOS.
How to reinstall macOS from macOS Recovery
Take care and be safe.
Thank you ArmMan1016. We'll give it a try and see if that solves the problem.
QuickTime in Catalina won't play H.264/AAC video
