1

Hello.
I need some help playing a video file that has the format of .BU

Google search states its a Samsung proprietary file format used for CCTV.

I have tried to play it, unable.
I have reached out to Samsung and they are of no help.
All the well-known converters don’t seem to help, and I’m not keen on trying the sketchy-looking sites claiming to be able to convert it.

Does anyone have any idea how i play this?

The three file types listed in the folder are:
.BU
.DB2
.EVE
I have also tried the Samsung Smartviewer, this doesn’t appear to have the ability to open a saved video only connect to CCTV cameras.

Any help appreciated.

7 Spice ups
2

First, get yourself a VLC media player. Then try just flipping the file extensions from .bu to .avi and just play it with the VLC. That may work with other media players as well, but I wouldn’t hold my breath, VLC is the best at handling a bigger range of encoding than most others.

4 Spice ups
3

Thanks for the reply. I did try VLC before posting but it didn’t work, and i agree its pretty awesome.

4

See if FormatFactory can convert it to something you can play.

You also might try changing the extension to other popular formats, good chance its in .mp4 format or something like that, they don’t usually create their own codecs.

1 Spice up
5

New .bu files are standard H.264, the old version is propitiatory, obsolete, and playable only with the help of the hardware that originally recorded it.

FWIW, I scrapped an entire surveillance system a few years back that had perfectly good cameras and a decent DVR solely because of the horrid incompatible Chinese propitiatory video format that system used , and the ghastly player it came with that crashed more often than it played video…

(I know this isn’t entirely helping…)

PS: maybe this: Using ffmpeg to convert an SEC file - Stack Overflow

(sec is another related samsung format from the golden age of secret formats)

6

This is a super old post, but just had the same problem just now. Here is the full software from Samsung, the viewer is nested down in the program folder.