As I knew, H.264 ES stream file can be played back by CorePlayer(Commercial version of MPlayer).
But not VLC Player. But as I was told that someone did use VLC Player to player H.264 ES stream file.
So made some further dig into this issue, turned out the old version of VLC Player does support, while versions later than 1.0 doesn’t by default.

If you need to play it in the latest version of VLC Player, all you need to do is make some setting change for the VLC player:
Tools –> Preferences –> Input/Codecs –> Demuxers
Select H264 video demuxer as your demux module before open the .264 file.