I have a client at the BBC who wants me to change H.264 QT files to PAL. Never heard of this before, and have checked some conversion charts' don't see it there, either. I always thought H.264 as a file is a file and doesn't have to be converted. And in the past, I have sent H.264 files to my BBC friends which seemed play just fine. I hope this is the right forum...any suggestions?

h.264 is just a compression codec. It doesn't tell us anything about the video's -

1. Aspect Ratio
2. Bit rate
3. Frame rate
4. Pixel Aspect Ratio
5. Scane - Interlaced or Progressive?
6. Colorspace - Log or Linear - RGB or YUV, etc?

It could be 2K, full HD, 720, PAL, NTSC, Youtube...at 24/25/30/50...i or p, Rec.709 or Cineon...you get the drift.

However, PAL is a standardized delivery medium:

1. 720x576
2. Can be varied according to the codec and originating format - BBC is very particular about this part. They don't accept DV/HDV or any 'prosumer' source format.
3. 25
4. 1.1 or 1.22 (4:3 or 16:9)
5. Interlaced (progressive only works on HD or a computer, not 'regular' television)
6. PAL color space

Hope this helps in some way.