GUI software to join 2 avi files into one

[leo5111]

GUI software to join 2 avi files into one, i have a 2 cd dvd rip, its 2 avi files i want to make em into 1

[D-cat]

There's actually a Windows program that's good for this called VirtualDub, and it runs okay under Wine. It's good because it can do direct stream copies of video and audio channels without re-encoding, which means high speed and no quality loss.

There are lots of programs for Linux that'll work with AVI files, but as far as I know, most all of them will want to transcode the file, which is a slow process. One linux program that looks like it might do the job for you is Avidemux. It's available in synaptic.

You should not simply do a binary join on AVI files because that violates the AVI structure; it should have a single index block at the end with the fourcc and keyframe data. Doing a binary join makes multiple (and sometimes conflicting) index blocks, confusing several players.
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In either editor, you open the first AVI file, then use "Append..." to open the second, third, and so on files. Set your codec options (both Audio and Video to "Copy" for a simple join), then "Save Video" to write the new AVI file. It must be a different name than any of the source files.

[reed9]

I know you said gui, but it's pretty easy from the command line.

Install mplayer and mencoder.

cat file.avi file2.avi file3.avi > joined-file.avi
mencoder joined-file.avi -o final-output.avi -forceidx -ovc copy -oac copy

[D-cat]

"Oh, I see wat u did ther"

Do the binary join, then use mencoder to fix the index block. Nice.

[reed9]

This got me thinking and I was googling around and discovered there is an even easier command line tool, as part of the transcode package.

From the man page,

avimerge -o big.avi -i my_file1.avi my_file2.avi my_file3.avi