Batch Append 2-Part Episodes

[goformickey]

I'm looking for a program to append episodes of a series that are named like so:

"Series Name - Episode 1 - Part 1.mp4""Series Name - Episode 1 - Part 2.mp4"
"Series Name - Episode 2 - Part 1.mp4"
"Series Name - Episode 2 - Part 2.mp4"

I just want to append part 2 to part 1 for each episode separately/

I've been searching around for longer than it probably would have taken to do it manually.

The only real answer I've stumbled upon was one where someone asked the same question as me, but answered it them self as they had scripting knowledge for Avidemux.

Found 2 ways that work:

avidemux_cli.exe --load part1.mp4 --append part2.mp4 --output-format MP4 --save final.mp4

and

ffmpeg.exe -f concat -i list.txt -c copy final.mp4

where list.txt looks like:

file 'C:\part1.mp4'
file 'C:\part2.mp4'

I myself don't know how to script and was hoping I wouldn't have to learn for this one time thing. Is there a program that will do this? or can anyone point me in the right direction to understand the scripting?

Thanks!!!

[Baldrick]

No such program. And making a batch seems very complex. Those scripts just shows how to join files and nothing special about the file names.

[goformickey]

No such program. And making a batch seems very complex. Those scripts just shows how to join files and nothing special about the file names.

Really?

What about a program for joining two files and queuing lots of jobs? What would be the best option for that?

Like drag in a file, drag in the second file, click "add to queue" or something, then repeat until I've queued all 250 files to be joined into 125? Or a program that uses what ever other simple methods for doing this with lots of files?

I'm repeating myself, but I'm basically just asking: In a situation where you need to join together A LOT of 2 part episodes, what would be the best way to go about it?

[fryk]

Example with mp4box:

@ECHO OFF &SETLOCAL
for /f "delims=" %%a in ('dir /b /a-d *1.mp4^|find "1.mp4"') do (
    set "fname=%%~a"
    setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
    set "sname=!fname:1.mp4=2.mp4!"
    set "nname=!fname:1.mp4=1 - 2.mp4!"
    mp4box -cat "!fname!" -cat "!sname!" "!nname!"
    endlocal
)

This might fail if file names contain characters like !%^ and similar.

[Budman1]

There is a similar request at https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/360389-Joining-Multiple-Files-in-same-directory and the same important question is, are they all the same codec and size?

If they are, you can use Fryk's example or ffmpeg or several others. If they aren't, there's none that I know of that will join without re-encoding. While that is not necessarily a bad thing, you wouldn't want 125 instances of any batch process or ffmpeg or mp4boxgui, etc. running all at once. That means you would have to kick each off manually because your computer isn't going to wait if you automate it... Not unless there's a program to schedule them and as far as I know, it hasn't been written... YET... (I'm playing around with it)

The reason it is hard to find a program or script for what you ask is that each objective to merge files is unique in their container, compression, filenames, amount of files to be merged, folder locations, etc. to name a few.

[Mephesto]

Do whatever you wanted to do in MKVToolnix or YAMB since you're dealing with an MP4 and it should display the commandline of how it did it. With YAMB it creates a log file in the directory of the video you processed so copy whatever was on there and manually edit the batch. You should only have to change the filenames.

I've personally had issues combining MP4s, MKVs might be easier.

[fryk]

MKV files with different codec settings or different numbers of tracks can be joined by UID linking, the VLC respects this properly. Imo you can't do this in MP4.