Joining 2 video files- too complex for Virtualdub?

[miketheratguy]

Hey everybody, I'm a new user so please bear with me.

I'll try to be as specific as possible. What I'm trying to do (and have been for a long time, actually) is find a way to join two video files, in this case AVI, so I can later play them or burn them as one single movie. The problem is, everybody and their best friend's parents swear up and down that to do this one must MUST use Virtualdub.

Now, I respect any program that does what it is meant to do, but VD just isn't possible for my clips. Not only does it insist that the files must be of identical bitrate, framerate, blood type, birthday, and sexual preference, but it seems to expect the clips to be almost the exact same thing period. I tried several times and each time was a new error with new digits.

My problem is that none of my clips are the same. None. They are all homemade rips of my dvd collection, resized for convenience and including commentary tracks where possible. I went through a massive summer-long project of ripping every last dvd I own so I could sell off the physical copies and pay for some college nonsense. Not only are my movies of all manner of bitrates, fps, size, etc., they are also NOT going to be ripped and re-encoded since they are no longer in my possession. Couldn't do it again if I wanted to.

Out of something like 500 movies, fortunately I only have maybe a dozen that had to be split because they were multi-disc. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Dances WIth Wolves, etc. I don't want to convert or re-encode or resize or change anything, all I want is the simple ability to be able to slap 'em together so I can play them back to back in one file. Not only is the different stat thing a problem, so is the fact that, again, these were ripped to include commentary tracks. I found a program that does the slapping, Ultra Video Joiner, but it not only resizes it also eliminates all but the first audio track.



I did try searching- for a couple days now actually, and while I can find problems similar to mine they aren't quite as complex and still usually end up with the Virtualdub recommendation. And again, I'll gladly use that one if it works, it just doesn't seem to. My wishes are this: Join 2 movie files or otherwise play them sequentially, preferably keeping them the size they already are, and also keeping their alternate audio tracks. In other words, no alteration at all other than gluing them together.

Sorry to go on at such length, I'm just trying to be specific so you know of the little obstacles I'm trying to figure out. Is what I'm trying to do possible? Thanks in advance for any help.

[redwudz]

Try AVIDemux as it's less sensitive than VD. But your videos still need to be very, very similar. That's just the way it is with video.

Secondly, if you don't own the copyrighted originals, then you can't own a copy. Look to our rules as in Warez.
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/72386-Forum-rules-Acceptable-Use-Policy-(AUP)

[Soixante]

http://www.doeasier.org/joiner/

http://www.boilsoft.com/avi-mpeg-rm-joiner.html

[hech54]

I went through a massive summer-long project of ripping every last dvd I own so I could sell off the physical copies and pay for some college nonsense.

[AlanHK]

Another recommendation for Avidemux, which is less fussy that VDub.

But how do you intend to play them? Many players, both hard and software, will play a series of files video-01.avi, video-02.avi... automatically.
Or some may support a playlist. Certainly many software players do. If so, you don't need to do any actual joining at all, perhaps just renaming.

[miketheratguy]

Thanks for the replies.

Wow...Is it really illegal for me to own my own backup copies now? I mean, it's not like I got them from friends and pirate sites, I ripped them from my own dvds and it took forever! 20 minutes to rip each disc and an hour and a half for autogk to reduce the size, times about 500! On one hand it makes sense- but I never heard of that side of it before. I mean, that's like saying that you can't videotape or dvr something off of tv since you don't own the rights to it. Or what if rather than selling them, my dvds were broken or stolen? Does that suddenly make my copies illegal?

Don't get me wrong, I mean no offense and I don't mean to sound like I'm trying to argue the rules of the site, I'm just explaining my honest confusion. It just never dawned on me that I was at all in questionable territory. I couldn't take all my discs to school so I copied them and packed them up, then I realized I could sell them for some textbooks so I thought what the hell, lol. I guess I'm in a weird spot now, but I didn't mean to sort of start my conversation here with a shady legal topic though. I assure you all that this is completely legit and I've still even got most of my receipts. I saw the warez rules but didn't think it applied since my copies were created by me from my own discs, you know? I thought that when you buy dvds they're yours to do what you want with, including making soft copies, and that the illegal stuff only came about if you were to make money off of THEM. In fact I felt good thinking I was one of the few people to use ripping software for its legally intended purpose, and now I'm all worried, lol.

Anyway I'll look into some of those programs you guys mentioned. I still tried to look into virtualdub last night and I hear that there's virtualdub MOD and now also "nandub" and the instructions really don't make a lot of sense. I'll keep trying to figure this out. I really don't understand why the files need to be of similar parameters. I mean from a technical viewpoint. It seems like it would be an easy thing to just "glue" two files together without modifying them.

As to the last response, frankly I'd be satisfied if VLC player would just play them together, since that's the program I use for opening everything. I guess I could try to cue them together or whatnot, but it also bugs me seeing the extra clutter on my hard drive when I could reduce a good handful of my movie files by joining them. Also, if I ever feel the need to burn any movies, video clips, etc it would be nice to have them in one cut rather than going to the dvd menu to choose part one or part 2, 3, etc.

In fact I'll put it this way- I'm trying to do this with my rip of the LOTR extended trilogy, which I DO still own the hard copy of. I can prove it if required.

[usually_quiet]

Thanks for the replies.

Is it really illegal for me to own my own backup copies now? I mean, it's not like I got them from friends and pirate sites, I ripped them from my own dvds and it took forever! 20 minutes to rip each disc and an hour and a half for autogk to reduce the size, times about 500! On one hand it makes sense- but I never heard of that side of it before. I mean, that's like saying that you can't videotape or dvr something off of tv since you don't own the rights to it. I don't mean to sound argumentative I'm just saying that surely this is a normal thing- rip your movies so you can get rid of the hard copy. I just needed space and money and I had two boxes loaded with dvds so I thought what the hell, it would be convenient to rip them onto a portable hard drive and just get rid of them! Lol. Oh well. I have receipts for most of them buried in another box somewhere so I guess I'm not too worried. Didn't mean to sort of start my conversation here with a shady legal topic though. I assure you all that this is completely legit. In fact I felt good thinking I was one of the few people to use ripping software for its legally intended purpose, lol.

No, what you did it isn't legitimate. Fair use applies only along as one retains possession of both the originals and the copies. Once the originals are sold, you loose the right to keep copies. The right to have copies for personal use was tranferred to the new owner along with the originals.

Archiving TV is theoretically covered by the right to time-shift TV viewing. Look up the Betamax case.

[miketheratguy]

Wow, I didn't know that. In a way it makes perfect sense, but I keep thinking about what I said before- what happened if someone stole my dvds in a burglary? Would I have to destroy all the data on my hard drive then? Or am I allowed to keep them for a certain amount of time until I get the dvds back? And again, what if one breaks? I'm obligated to buy a second copy just to have the right to that backup?

It's weird, I guess until you get in the situation you never really think about how copyrights apply to you. It bums me out that with so many people making pirate movies from the theater and smuggling rings in foreign countries, someone who actually had a real and honest use for his copies is apparently just as in the wrong! I'll definitely look at the Betamax case though, that sounds interesting. I know it's an old format that died when I was really young, but I didn't know there was any kind of copyright lawsuit involved.

Anyway, forget all that then. I'll just concentrate on the Lord of the Rings movies for now then, since again, I still have my physical copies of those. I wouldn't get rid of those, the extended editions were really classy and they stopped printing them so they're one of the few I still have. I'll just talk about them.

Since I DO still have them, I guess I could rereip them, though I'm not looking forward to the day or so of the process. Even if I was to re-rip them, could I still even bother joining the rips together and still keep the alternate audio tracks? Each disc of each LOTR movie has a total of 5 tracks, and any of the joiner programs mentioned here ignore that and only convert the first track.

And again, I'm still confused- what I'm looking to do is simply "glue" the two files together at each end, making the end of one play right into the beginning of another. On a technical level, why is this so hard? I'm still learning.

[redwudz]

It's not so hard to 'glue' two videos together, as long as they are virtually the same. If they aren't, then you have to change one or the other to a common format/specification. VD will reject a video if the framerate is off by maybe .003fps, so maybe not a great joining program for your purposes. VD Mod uses an older version of VD with some mods to open other types of files. NanDub is based on the VD source code but hasn't been updated in a long time. I would probably go with AVIDemux.

[AlanHK]

Wow...Is it really illegal for me to own my own backup copies now?

Asking that is good way to start a long acrimonious and ultimately pointless debate. And your original questions will never be answered.

It's the videohelp equivalent of starting a topic on gun rights or evolution or global warming.

Plenty of people will very vehemently tell you one thing or another. None of them are lawyers. Only thing that's relevant here is that the forum owner doesn't want to be harassed by accusations that the site advocates piracy. So I think the rule of thumb is "Don't ask, don't tell". And ignore any such questions from anyone who isn't an official moderator.

[miketheratguy]

Well okay, I can understand that. I just wanted to make sure I was doing things the right way, and I figured that since this site is where I first heard the question of illegality, that this is where I'd get more specific information. Like I said, I'll just stick to talking about my physical movies and for the understandable reason of not wanting to bring any stress down on the forum, I'll just not discuss legal issues at all. Like I said, no offense intended.

Since I'm still confused about the joining issue though, can anyone give me a layman's explanation as to why video of different parameters can't easily be joined, yet things like mp3s can? I've never done any encoding- at least not knowingly. I just rip my dvds and try to resize them to a more manageable size. For example, I ripped Return of the King to about 1.5 gigabytes for each disc, but realized that all the audio tracks take up so much space that I would only get a good quality copy if I scaled them up to at least 2 gigs per disc. Does this mean I was re-encoding them?

Since the second disc is longer than the first, how does one rip them to be of equal parameters so they can be joined? And if they're made equal, doesn't that mean that the quality of the larger disc will suffer when it's ripped? I guess what I'm saying is, since even discs made up of the same film don't have the same parameters, how do I force them to without changing their quality?

Redwudz, I'm looking into Avidemux but it's going to take me some time to figure it out. Obviously, I'm new at this. Are you familiar enough with that program to tell me if it will indeed retain the extra audio tracks of each file so the finished product will allow me to select between the commentaries?

[AlanHK]

Since I'm still confused about the joining issue though, can anyone give me a layman's explanation as to why video of different parameters can't easily be joined, yet things like mp3s can?

Videos with different spec can be joined, but one or both will have to be converted to a matching format.
As for MP3s, they have to match too. If you use an MP3 editor, like MP3DirectCut it will not join audio files with different specs.

Most audio editors decode the audio and then you re-encode the whole thing when you save it. Audio encoding is much faster than video, so you may not be aware that this is happening.

It might be annoying, but it's worse if the program just does a conversion without notifying you, as that will certainly degrade the quality.

Video specs are more complex than audio. So there are more choices to make.

I've never done any encoding- at least not knowingly. I just rip my dvds and try to resize them to a more manageable size.

That's encoding. Converting to a different format (AVI) from the original MPEG) is (almost always) reencoding.

Codecs like DivX and even more so, H.264, are much more efficient than the MPEG2 used in DVDs, so you can get a smaller file with similar quality.

Since the second disc is longer than the first, how does one rip them to be of equal parameters so they can be joined? And if they're made equal, doesn't that mean that the quality of the larger disc will suffer when it's ripped? I guess what I'm saying is, since even discs made up of the same film don't have the same parameters, how do I force them to without changing their quality?

The spec is not the size of the file, it's the codec and the bitrate (bits per second).
And a lot of other things.

Redwudz, I'm looking into Avidemux but it's going to take me some time to figure it out. Obviously, I'm new at this. Are you familiar enough with that program to tell me if it will indeed retain the extra audio tracks of each file so the finished product will allow me to select between the commentaries?

Just try it. Open a video, it only takes a minute.
I've used it to strip out extra audio tracks, so I know that it does let you manipulate at least two tracks.

[miketheratguy]

Thanks, that's some good information. I'm still confused by most of this stuff, but this does answer some of the specifics I was trying to understand.

I'll spend some more time with Avidemux and see what I can figure out. I'm trying to get some info about it browsing some tutorials, but are there any you would recommend for someone specifically trying to do what I am (as far as keeping the commentaries and these little specifics)?

[ricoman]

Just for the record MTRG, fairuse itself is quite controversial, the studios don't agree with fairuse and have spent tons of lobby money trying to get congress to outlaw it entirely. It's only on forums like these that you would find any support for fairuse. The studios contend that just having the software is illegal and have sued several companies out of existence. (see Lightning UK and DVDecrytor or XCopy).

[video_magic]

For what miketheratguy wants to do (play the movies in a sequence or whatever), best to keep all his AVIs as they are, and make an AVS or a simple playlist file (i.e. m3u common format should work for that).

[jagabo]

Since I'm still confused about the joining issue though, can anyone give me a layman's explanation as to why video of different parameters can't easily be joined...?

Because the AVI format does not allow midstream changes to occur to the video or audio. The AVI header indicates certain things about the video and audio and the entire contents has to match.

[jagabo]

Archiving TV is theoretically covered by the right to time-shift TV viewing. Look up the Betamax case.

The Betamax decision specifically avoided the issue of archiving.

[miketheratguy]

Wow, a bunch more information. This is really interesting- even though it's a scary thought that fair use itself is apparently becoming an outlaw concept.

It doesn't surprise me that the movie studios are the ones complaining though. For every year that they talk about how much the pirates are eating into their profits, notice that you also hear how each year was "a record year" for the box office or that it's "10 percent ahead of the same time last year". When you're rolling in cash like that, no wonder you have all the time in the world to sneer at people who just want to make a backup of their own dvd, lol.

Honestly, I wouldn't even need to ask half my questions if there wasn't such a myriad of codecs, containers, options, formats, etc. I don't want things to be universal- choice is good- but I didn't even hear about an mkv until I came to this site. I'm just an old fashioned guy trying to make his movies convenient, which is why all I'm trying to do is snap them together and not worry about all the rest.

I accidentally got the wrong file- AVIMux GUI, as opposed to avidemux, and to my surprise it's actually really helpful- I can use this tool to add or subtract audio tracks, which is very handy. But alas, even that program didn't seem to want to work with the joining of video files. Still trying to understand Avidemux. It's probably basic for you guys but a little overwhelming to someone new.

Can anyone expand on what video magic was talking a few posts above? I'm not exactly sure what he's referring to but it sounds like it's something that would be what I could use- that is, something to piece together the files as they are without altering them.

[AlanHK]

Can anyone expand on what video magic was talking a few posts above? I'm not exactly sure what he's referring to but it sounds like it's something that would be what I could use- that is, something to piece together the files as they are without altering them.

Same thing I mentioned a few days ago.

But how do you intend to play them? Many players, both hard and software, will play a series of files video-01.avi, video-02.avi... automatically.
Or some may support a playlist. Certainly many software players do. If so, you don't need to do any actual joining at all, perhaps just renaming.

An "m3u" file was originally a playlist for MP3 files. But if your player can play it, it works just as well for other media files.

Simplest format is just a text file with extension .m3u, listing the files one per line in the order you want them to play.

videoABC.avi
videoDEF.avi
audio123.mp3

Then play using eg MPC, VLC or many others.

[miketheratguy]

Hmm, I've never heard of that. So does this mean that I make up a text document that simply lists the name of the videos in the order I want to play them- in this case Return of the King disc 1.avi and then disc 2.avi, and then direct VLC to open this text document that has the .m3u extension? Or do I put the clips in the same folder as the m3u and VLC player will detect it and form the playlist that way?

I can try this myself but it will be much later since I have to wait to get back onto my laptop which is where the clips are.

[AlanHK]

does this mean that I make up a text document that simply lists the name of the videos in the order I want to play them

Yes.

http://wiki.videolan.org/Playlist

[usually_quiet]

Archiving TV is theoretically covered by the right to time-shift TV viewing. Look up the Betamax case.

The Betamax decision specifically avoided the issue of archiving.

That's why I said "theoretically". Time-shifting is what the ruling addresses, but it does not specify how long recordings made for the purpose of time-shifting TV can be saved. So, in theory, once made, the original recordings can be kept for the life of the recording medium, or as long as a subscriber has his DVR/PVR service, if that is applicable.

[KneeRow]

Wow...Is it really illegal for me to own my own backup copies now?

Asking that is good way to start a long acrimonious and ultimately pointless debate. And your original questions will never be answered.

It's the videohelp equivalent of starting a topic on gun rights or evolution or global warming.

Plenty of people will very vehemently tell you one thing or another. None of them are lawyers. Only thing that's relevant here is that the forum owner doesn't want to be harassed by accusations that the site advocates piracy. So I think the rule of thumb is "Don't ask, don't tell". And ignore any such questions from anyone who isn't an official moderator.

I agree with this fence sitting is the best policy. I am such a person that is "very vehemently on one side or another".
So to me, I am a bit wryly amused by this sites' fence sitting policy, this DADT tactic. It is a bit like smoking pot in Amsterdam:
We all know that most of the sites like these, ultimately are used to edit illegal stuff. But we choose to ignore this, since it's physically impossible to do something about it, or rather, not worth our while.

To me, that is a good laugh.

Just for the record MTRG, fairuse itself is quite controversial, the studios don't agree with fairuse and have spent tons of lobby money trying to get congress to outlaw it entirely. It's only on forums like these that you would find any support for fairuse. The studios contend that just having the software is illegal and have sued several companies out of existence. (see Lightning UK and DVDecrytor or XCopy).

Just because the studios disagree with something doesn't make it controversial. And the fact that the studios even COULD sue tiny companies out of existence, also doesn't make it just. It only means that (financial) might makes right, in a litigious society. As far as these issues go, the law of the jungle apparently applies. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't wanna go to battle against Microsoft because they think the name "Windows Commander" is infringing upon their ability to make money. I too, would change the name, and put my energy into my kids and friends etc.
But that doesn't make it just.

It's a sad comment on our society that even discussing these issues has every site owner running scared, often when site owners aren't even physically in the US ....
It's sort of Police State practices Light, and that's a whole less funny than it sounds.

Apparently, free speech doesn't really apply, when the (imagined) threat of Big Corp lawsuit hangs over your head.

[KneeRow]

I've used it to strip out extra audio tracks, so I know that it does let you manipulate at least two tracks.

I've never been able to retain the second track in avidemux, i've always had to use vdubmod. if you have a link on how to do this in avidemux, please.