Merging 2 AVI files without encoding? Possible?

[lonelyassassin]

Hi everyone,
I have 2 AVI files. Everything is the same: size, bitrate, audio, etc.

I want to merge them together into 1 file. Is there a program that can do that without encoding? (cause encoding takes too long and sometimes changing the quality of the video)

[redwudz]

VirtualDub or VirtualDub Mod. It accepts most 'AVI' type files. Add the first part, then use 'Append' to add the rest. Save out as a 'Direct stream copy' and it should only take a few minutes.

One note: If your final destination is DVD, you may not want to combine the files just yet. You can encode them separately to MPG-2 DVD compliant video and use an authoring program like TMPGEnc DVD Author to 'join' them as you author. This solves a lot of sync problems. If the original file is a Xvid or Divx with MP3 VBR audio, you will usually need to save the audio out as a WAV file with VD to avoid sync problems. Then processs the audio file before authoring.

You might also look into ConvertXToDVD as it can accept 2 AVI type files and output a DVD file, to make all this easier.