Combining video files on a Mac

July 4, 2004 9:18 AM

Joining video on a Mac: I have a friend who has several sets of WMVs and AVIs and would like to combine them into single, contiguous movies. I'mHe's not going to have to buy something expensive, is he?

What do you use to rejoin your porn on OSX?

posted by majick to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Why not just drag them all into your media player and the media player will cycle through them as if they were joined. Plus, that way you can mix it up for fun.
posted by banished at 10:40 AM on July 4, 2004

Response by poster: That's a neat idea, and in fact exactly what I do now with chunked movies of any type, but it sure would be nice to just lump em in together. I know you can cat MPEGs together and get an invalid but playable stream. Unfortunately, this doesn't work at all with AVIs and WMVs.

Seems like it'd be an ideal job for mplayer, but after staring intently at the manpage it doesn't appear to do anything of the sort. Go figure.
posted by majick at 10:49 AM on July 4, 2004

A quick search on macupdate turned up D-Vision, which claims to be able to join and split Divx and XVid encoded video. I can't vouch for it, but that sounds good enough to handle your AVIs if not you WMVs.
posted by boaz at 10:58 AM on July 4, 2004

Transcode. It's a linux program, but they claim operability on OSX. How comfortable are you compiling code?
posted by mr_roboto at 10:58 AM on July 4, 2004

Well if you've got mplayer you've probably got mencoder too. You could reencode the videos to mpeg and, as you mentioned, concatenate them. But assuming you don't want to do anything that ugly, there's avidemux. It's a simple but pretty solid program which does amongst other things 'append video'. Don't know if it works under OSX though.


Keep in mind though that the files probably use different codecs (WMV has its own codec based on mpeg-4 I think, and the avi could contain anything), and in any reasonable setup the resulting file will use only one video codec. Which means you will need to reencode at least part of the video, and seeing as they're all lossy codecs no doubt, that means video quality degradation.
posted by fvw at 11:18 AM on July 4, 2004

Response by poster: Very.

majick$ which transcode
/usr/local/bin/transcode

Now what I need is a Compleat Video Newb's Guide To Making Transcode Do Things.
posted by majick at 11:21 AM on July 4, 2004

JFuse and ffmpegX can both join AVI DivX files together. I have not seen anything that can join WMV files.

JFuse can join multiple files at a time, but seems to get the audio out of sync.

ffmpegX can only join two files at a time, and does not seem to cause out of sync audio.
posted by the biscuit man at 11:35 AM on July 4, 2004

Response by poster: From the avidemux changelog: "Altivec code for YV12 RGB on darwin."

Darwin's OSX's kernel, and Altivec is a PPC thing, so I'm going to hazard a guess it may well be a supported port if I get the deps satisfied (the GUI appears to want GTK+ and glib). No clues if it'll do the job yet, at least for AVI chunks.

This seems like it ought to be a really much easier problem to deal with, at least from an end user perspective: take a bunch of dinky movies (assuming identical codecs), lop off headers, concatenate and reindex them.
posted by majick at 11:45 AM on July 4, 2004

if you have a nonlinear editing program (final cut avid premiere i dont know if imovie will do it) you can rerender all of the videos to whatever format you wish and join them together as well. also take out annoying ads or whatever. they are fairly easy to use.
posted by headless at 1:41 PM on July 4, 2004