joining .mpg question about 'join' tool

[Guido]

Hello,
I have 3 .mpg files that will make a continuous movie. I would like to avoid using imovie to get the sequences together because importing to imovie takes to much time and disk space. And I just need to make 1 .mpg from 2...
I found out that ffmpegX does have a function 'join'. Online help just says that it would join the 2 .mpg files. So I though it is what I need.
Here's what I did :
I selected the first .mpg (mpeg1 in this case) in the first browse tag. The second in the second (no joke), then pressed the join button. ffmpegX seems to work (a long time, but that's seems also normal). Then I get a 'Done' message, but obviously, nothing has change with my files (I checked disk space : I have about 15Go for 2 .mpg of 500Mo).
I guess I misunderstood the use of the join function. Can you tell me if I am completly in a wrong path or if I just forgot something.

[major]

The joined file should be there, in the same folder as your source files. Make a search for it if you don't see it.

[Guido]

Thanks for replying Major.
I just gave an other try. No result. I'll try to give you more informations :

FFMPEGX 0.0.9 (french version)
G4 450/1Go with OS10.2.6
30Go available on disk. (I made some clean up)

Source files :
I used FFmpegX to encode to MPEG1
Codec : MPEG1 (.mpg) FFmpeg
9800 kbits/s
DVD 16/9
NTCS Film 23,976
no audio

I don't get any new file in the folder containing the source. could you please tell me the name of the file I should get if the source files'name are 'name1.mpg' and 'name2.mpg'.

I encoded the two files at the same time (same ffmpegx settings) so I think they have the same size and bitrate.

But, may be ffmpegX encoded using a variable bitrate that would make the process fail...
I'll have to give a try with constant bitrate.
By the way, if I understood well, I should set Qmin to 0 to get a constant bitrate with ffmpeg codec, correct ?

[Guido]

I tried with 2 other .mpg files I made with mepg1(ffmpeg) codec using qmin=0 and qmax=0 (if I correctly understood documentation this should make a constant bitrate file. then I tried to join the 2 files, and it still oesn't work.

[major]

Does it work by demuxing first?

[Guido]

Great, it works !
I demux my .mpg files and get .m1v (no audio so far).
Then the join function works fine.
I have to work on the audio now.
thanks Major. Your work is terrific. KIT