How do I combine two .mp4 movies on a Mac?

November 16, 2006 4:39 PM

I recently used HandBrake to rip a DVD I've had sitting around as a sort of test project. The only problem is, it split it into two movies. My first instinct was to combine them using iMovie, but that took about 6 hours just to import them, and once they were imported the sound was off. So iMovie is out. Any suggestions as to a free application (or cheapware) for my Mac (10.4) that will merge these into the one movie I want them to be?
posted by dondiego87 to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

If you don't want to pony up for QuickTime "Pro" features like joining and exporting movies, you can use the free QTCoffee which does nearly the same stuff but from the command line.
posted by majick at 5:05 PM on November 16, 2006

QuickTime Pro (or alternatives) will do it, but only by combining the two movies into one "container", which will be .mov. They won't be a standard .mp4 anymore, and will only play in QuickTime. (Not on an iPod or any other portable player, for example.)

There's no other way of joining them without re-encoding them.
posted by Mwongozi at 5:16 PM on November 16, 2006

How long was this movie? I've never seen this behavior.
posted by kindall at 6:01 PM on November 16, 2006

Try Techspansion's VisualHub. It cost $23 and change and the added benefit is that you can convert multiple formats to mp4 format. Money well spent.
posted by inviolable at 6:18 PM on November 16, 2006

That's pretty odd - I guess I've never tried ripping a 4 hour movie or on two discs? That's the only reason I can think of you getting two files. Unless you need to do more editing, I think your best bet is to upgrade to QT Pro ($29). To upgrade, all you need to do in QT is to find the UPGRADE TO PRO menu choice and Apple will lead you through the rest. After that, open PART I. There's a "atari" like shape under the bar that turns gray as the video plays. Drag the right one all the way to the end so now it's all gray. Select COPY. Now open your PART II - make sure the "atari" bar is at the beginning of the video. PASTE. Now when you save, you actually want to select EXPORT which will give you some options. If you want no compression to maintain the quality, then select DV and adjust the settings to best. If you want a smaller file size and or compression, you can select from about 10 format options including ipod* you can download a free DIVX component also ... it may take a while depending on the speed of your computer but it's not like you have to watch it - the advantage over doing it in imovie is that you don't have to spend hours importing and then perhaps hours exporting it in iMovie. once you have this single DV file, you can always drag it into iMovie to edit in the future. Good luck!

* Frankly, I prefer to leave it in DV format even though it takes up a lot of room - if it's important - this way you can choose a different format later on - for instance, while ipod video has already changed from 320 to 480? Right? And if the video ipod comes out with a bigger screen 720? so by having a DV file, it can be later compressed to another format as often as you like. If future compatbility is not a big deal or you don;t have the room or a spare DVD-R, then you can compress now ...
posted by jbelkin at 9:38 PM on November 16, 2006

Response by poster: Turns out my poor machine was just overloaded and that's why the sound was off in iMovie. It worked fine the next day.

@kindall: I don't know if you were referring to Handbrake's behavior or iMovie's behavior, but I'm assuming Handbrake. The movie is your standard-length cinema-released film, about 2 hours. I think Handbrake's splitting the movie might have had something to do with the DVD I ripped from being a backup of the actual DVD that wouldn't play in a player. (I hadn't yet discovered HandBrake.) There were two folders on the disc, "Audio_TS" and "Video_TS".

Anyway, I tried QTCoffee, and after I wrangled the command line (I'm a quasi-n00b on that front) I actually managed to get it to produce an output file for me. The only thing is, Quicktime couldn't open it because "there was an error opening the file."

So I just gave up and went back to the original time-consuming plan of sending the iMovie I had made to iDVD and burning it. It now plays in my DVD player.

Thanks for your help anyway though!
posted by dondiego87 at 11:44 AM on November 18, 2006