This forum is for questions and discussion of all the aspects of handling your footage. If you have questions about capturing/ripping footage, AviSynth, or compression/encoding/converting, look here.
.. your not waisting your time with that question, your just spinning your wheels looking for a Bug-FREE x.264 -or- h.264 Codec. These are Beta Codec's that are currently being tested here. What we are doing with them is trying to figure-out why they are unstable and work around that issues. naah, your not waisting our time by asking that question
I'm not really aware with them being buggy. Just encode it, then any compliant decoder should be able to play it back. If you want to avoid directshow, VLC player should work just fine.
x264 has been considered stable since revision 80; it's now at 667. This means it's been stable for 2-3 years. Also the updates have slowed down which indicates it's mostly becoming feature complete, or the authors have lives and do not have time any more.
VfW is non standard and hacky, use directshow or a CLI and produce spec compliant encodes.