I see.

Steve Guilford, can you make archive in tar.gz(not zip) of your installed kdenlive folder(without sources directory, because it is too big) and give me a link to it. Or send me a personal massage and I'll give you my gmail to connect for file transferring f.e by pidgin. I want to try your build of kdenlive on my Debian installation.

I ended up with installing on Debian 7(stable) kdenlive 0.9.6(because I wanted to use that version) from deb-multimedia repo(for Debian 7 wheezy) . There is no problem with h264 rendering with that version.