WinDVD and Joined AVIs

[kdla1957]

Firstly - Thanks to the UncasMS who's post taught me how to copy/b.

Now, herein lies my problem, which is really just a minor annoyance. If I join two halves of a movie back together, they no longer will play in WinDVD and will only play using Microsoft Media Player. This happens with both command-line and VirtualDub methods.

I can only surmise that because these movies are actually DIVX with an AVI extension, something happens to the formatting when they are reunited.??

Experience tells me that (as usual) I am doing something wrong.

Anyone care to verify my experience??
Regards,
kdla1957

[MilesAhead]

You can try AviDemux. After installing make sure you go into Edit=>Preferences Automation Tab. Check all the options. Load the first avi/divx file. Then in the file menu, choose Append and load the 2nd half. If all the automation boxes are checked, it should reindex the 2 joined files. Then save the file. It should play on just about any software player. In fact, many times that's all I need to do to play it on my stand-alone DVD player(it has .divx support.)

[kdla1957]

Thank you

Thanks for the info. I will give it a shot for sure.

Just a side note. Using the command-line
copy/b video1.avi +video2.avi newvideo.avi
seemed to work beautifully. It was so simple, right file size for the new file, no errors, and the video did play. There's no test like a FULL test... The video stopped playing at the seam.

Maybe it's just the one video and I should try the same on another set...

Regards
Kdla1957

[kdla1957]

The issue was not VirtualDub at all. The joined files play using WinDVD - WinDVD just doesn't display the video in a Remote Desktop Session... Silly me.

This does not explain however, the fact that Copy/b from the command line would produce a video that did not show the appended video but, grew to the combined size of both videos. The video slider would go all the way across and the video would end abruptly as if it were still just the first half of the video.

AviDemux worked just as nicely as did VirtualDub. So now I have two good tools, one of which will work nicely on my Ubuntu Laptop.

Regards,
kdla1957

[MilesAhead]

Yes, with .avi files if you alter them then the index has to be rebuilt. You can probably find a list online somewhere of video compression types that don't have to be indexed to play and those that do. I think .mpg you can just binary copy to append them but it doesn't work with .avi. The formats where the binary copy won't work usually have utilities to combine a bunch of files together such as AsfBinMaster for .asf files etc..