How long does it generally take to join HD videos together?

[snafubaby]

I have a somewhat slow PC. it's an old 1.80ghz compaq laptop. i went to take 6 HD videos, 5 minutes each, and merge them together. I used Freemake video converter. it took like 4 hours. is this the norm? What speed of PC would be good to buy in order to lessen the amount of time? Do i look for a quad core gaming pc to do it within an hour or two? Please advise.

[smrpix]

There's no "generally" answer to this question.

If all the parameters of the files match it can be almost instantaneous with something like AviDemux. If they are mismatched files with color corrections and other filters it can take days.

The faster the computer the better. CPU speed and core count are generally more important than GPU.

[vhelp]

4 hours ? merging is just contatenation, or copying. but it sounds more like it re-encoded those if it took that long. it should have only been a few minutes, depending on cpu speed.

[snafubaby]

Thanks for the info, smrpix and vhelp. which software should i use, where it won't re-encode them, where it will only join them together? Thanks!

[hech54]

Thanks for the info, smrpix and vhelp. which software should i use, where it won't re-encode them, where it will only join them together? Thanks!

If they are 5 completely unrelated videos......there is NO software like that.

[vhelp]

well, to start with, try ffmpeg.

then open a dos console window and enter the following. should be really quick since it is just copying each video into the new container. this assume all your videos are in the same format, ie, fps, resolution and codec, otherwise, (as hech54 pointed out) it won't work, or it will re-encode all the videos with default settings for the encoder/container.

ffmpeg.exe -i video1 -i video2 -i video3 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -y newvideo.mkv

[smrpix]

Thanks for the info, smrpix and vhelp. which software should i use, where it won't re-encode them, where it will only join them together? Thanks!

AviDemux, as I mentioned earlier. I like ffmpeg too, which vhelp has given explicit instructions for above.