Any way to combine MPG (mpeg) MOV & WMV files together?

[Sondra R. Wilson]

Doing a skit, we need to combine very many multiple 30-second clips
together on our windows xp laptops to bring to summer school class for
our final team project.

First question is does anyone know how to concatonate the same type of
files together into a single file in batch or very quick modes?

Second question is does anyone know how to combine different file
types together (mpeg, mpg, mov, & wmv)?

Can we do it with free stuff?
(We don't have much time or money and it's due next Thursday so I'm
asking BEFORE researching so just give me a name or two and I can look
them up please).

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

First question is does anyone know how to concatonate the same type of
files together into a single file in batch or very quick modes?

I found freeware M1-Edit after starting my research into this.
http://www.videohelp.com/m1edit.htm

M1-Edit seems to care whether the files are mpeg-1 or mpeg-2
(something we never thought about).

How do I know if my files are mpg-1 or mpg-2?

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

I found freeware M1-Edit after starting my research into this.

http://www.videohelp.com/m1edit.htm

The links were bad at that web page so I moved on to something called
TMPGEnc
http://www.videohelp.com/tmpgencedit.htm

Hopefully TMPGEnc will allow our group to concatonate very many
multiple 30-second mpg, mov, and wmv files together into a single DVD.

I'll keep researching but if you have some good directions to try
please post the name so I can then download and try it out.

 

[kenny]

not freeware but these 2 can do exactly as you want

http://www.eo-video.com/

http://www.pegasys-inc.com/en/product/te3xp.html

perhaps the trial versions is good enough for you

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

How do I know if my files are mpg-1 or mpg-2?

Searching, I found a MPEG Properties free ware tool
http://www.filepedia.com/video_software/video_tools/mpeg_properties.cfm

Once this MPEG properties download is up and running, I'll see if it
can tell me which mpg and mpeg files are mpeg-1 and which are mpeg-2.

But I still don't know what the difference is or why it may matter.

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

http://www.eo-video.com/

http://www.pegasys-inc.com/en/product/te3xp.html

Perhaps the trial versions is good enough for you.

Thanks for the pointer to Evideo and TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress.

I had already downloaded TMPGEnc-2.524.63.18-Free.zip by the time I
saw your message. The names 'seem' similar but the stuff I picked up
is definately freeware whereas the stuff you pointed me to has a
similar (but different) name.

When I read what each does, I get even more confused than before (I
don't know what half the terms mean, but, I keep looking them up one
by one).

With respect to what we are trying to accomplish tonight, is there a
simple way to state what the difference is between the freeware
TSUNAMI-MPEG Encoder" TMPGEnc 2.5 download I already installed (from
http://www.tmpgenc.net/e_faq.html ) and the trialware TMPGEnc 3.0
XPress at http://www.pegasys-inc.com/en/product/te3xp.html which you
so kindly recommended?

Are they essentially the same thing?

 

[John Corliss]

Doing a skit, we need to combine very many multiple 30-second clips
together on our windows xp laptops to bring to summer school class for
our final team project.

First question is does anyone know how to concatonate the same type of
files together into a single file in batch or very quick modes?

Second question is does anyone know how to combine different file
types together (mpeg, mpg, mov, & wmv)?

Can we do it with free stuff?
(We don't have much time or money and it's due next Thursday so I'm
asking BEFORE researching so just give me a name or two and I can look
them up please).

From the freewarehome.com website comes the following:

http://member.newsguy.com/~theprof/Readme.html

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

I moved on to something called TMPGEnc
http://www.videohelp.com/tmpgencedit.htm

Hopefully TMPGEnc will allow our group to concatonate very many
multiple 30-second mpg, mov, and wmv files together into a single DVD.

I installed the Tsunami-MPEG-Encoder program (version 2.524.63.181)
from the URL above which apparently is freeware except for something
it says is its "MPEG-2 function", whichsubcomponent is on 30-day
trial. I think I can infer from this that TMPGEnc will handle both
MPEG-2 and MPEG-2 files so I won't have to use MPEG-Properties to
figure out which is which. Good.

I first tried feeding TMPGEnc my three test mpg files (1.mpg, 2.mpg,
and 3.mpg) but TMPGEnc kept wanting to save them as mpg files (which
they already were). In fact, TMPGEnc kept wanting to save each mpg
files as two mpg files (one of which was very short and contained only
a black screen).

At this point, I am realizing (in real time) that TMPGEnc is not a
tool for concatonating files (despite what the web page above seems to
imply) .... but is more likely a tool for CONVERSION of files to MPG.

This, in and of itself, may be useful to us as we have a bunch of wmv
and mov files too. So, I fed TMPGEnc the three test wmv files (1.wmv,
2.wmv, and 3.wmv) and much to my surprise, TMPGEnc converted each of
them to mpg files. Good.

My hesitant summary at this point (in real time) is that while TMPEnc
doesn't seem to concatonate mpg files, it does convert the wmv files
to mpg which may simplify our task somewhat since we can now get all
the short movie files in the same format.

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

My hesitant summary at this point (in real time) is that while TMPEnc
doesn't seem to concatonate mpg files, it does convert the wmv files
to mpg which may simplify our task somewhat since we can now get all
the short movie files in the same format.

I should have noted for this real-time learning experience, that the
three test mov files also converted to mpg by the TMPGEnc program.

According to TMPGEnc, they were converted to mpeg-1 files as shown in
the log file below ....

Video-CD NTSC (MPEG-1 352x240 29.97fps CBR 1150kbps, Layer-2 44100Hz
224kbps).

Based on the fact that the newly installed MediaLab Stockholm
mpegprop.exe program says these mpg files are "VideoCD" and the fact
that TMPGEnc says above they are Video-CD (MPEG-1), I'm going to
assume Video-CD is the same as MPEG-1 and that I can now get all our
files into this MPEG-1 format.

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

I just realized that TMPGEnc DOES concatonate files - but not in the
way we at first imagined.

TMPGEnc seems to concatonate what it calls the "Video source" from one
file with what it calls the "Audio source" from the same or another
file to create the final mpg file. (In all my tests so far, both
sources were from the same file.)

Since we need to concatonate complete mpg, mov, and wmv files, this
feature of TMPGEnc, while interesting, is not the concatonation we
were looking for.

So I'm going to abandon TMPGEnc in favor of some other program for the
purpose of concatonation (but I will use TMPGEnc for converting the
mov, mpg, and wmv files to MPEG-1 so that at least they are all of the
same format).

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

I found freeware M1-Edit after starting my research into this.
http://www.videohelp.com/m1edit.htm

I see links to EO-Video 2.0 and Camel MPEGJoin 1.0.7b were posted so I
will try them out now.

For the real-time record, even though the link above to M1Edit was
bad, subsequent searches found a viable M2-edit Pro download site at
http://www.popularshareware.com/M1-edit-Pro-screenshot-405.html

Even though this web page uses the word "free" all over the place, as
soon as I ran M2-Edit Pro version 05.07.0083 (Dec. 9, 2003), four
windows popped up which looked like what we wanted (a Monitor, a
Storyboard, a Composer, and a Navigator) but along with that came the
message from MediaWare Solutions that this was a demo version which
could not open MPEG-2 files and which could not write files longer
than 29 seconds.

That makes M2-Edit Pro kind of useless (for our purposes) so I will
move on to see if eovideo or camel mpegjoin will allow us to
concatonate multiple mpg files into a single mpg file and let you know
what comes of it so as to pay you back for your courteous suggestions.

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

For the real-time record, even though the link above to M1Edit was
bad, subsequent searches found a viable M2-edit Pro download site at
http://www.popularshareware.com/M1-edit-Pro-screenshot-405.html

I should have noted a couple of things about this M2-Edit Pro
download.

First, while the link above and the expected download was to something
called M1-edit-Pro, what we actually got was M2-Edit-Pro. Go figure.
Anway, I don't have a clue what the difference would be but since M2
Edit Pro was limited to 29 second output files, it doesn't seem like
this will be a viable avenue to explore. Still, it would be nice to
know why we get M2 Edit Pro when we try to download M1-Edit Pro
(expecially since the MPEG-2 functionality appears to arrive
disabled).

I think we can give up on the aforementioned MediaLab Stockholm
MPEGprop program because M2 Edit Pro seems to have the same test
functionality in itsl INFO window. For example, M2 Edit Pro says the
test files are of the format:

File name : C:\art101\movie1.mpg
File size : 10502156
Duration : 59.993267 s
Number of frames: 1798
Drop frame flag : not set
Systems :
format = MPEG-1 Systems Stream
mux rate = 1411200 b/s
real bit rate = 1394207 b/s
Video :
stream ID = 0xE0
format = MPEG-1
chroma format = 4:2:0
horizontal size = 352
vertical size = 240
aspect ratio = 1.0950 CCIR601 525 line
display width = 352
display height = 240
frame rate = 29.97003 frame/s
bit rate = 1150000 bit/s
start time code = 00:00:00:00
first PTS = 0.3400778
last PTS = 60.299976
vbv buf size = 40960
Audio :
stream ID = 0xC0
format = LAYER_II
bit rate = 224000 bit/s
sampling rate = 44100 Hz
mode = STEREO
first PTS = 0.3400778
last PTS = 60.003746
audio duration = 59.68979

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

That makes M2-Edit Pro kind of useless (for our purposes)
so I will move on .....

Our first success!

Somewhere in my searches, links to the DV-Tool public software by "CM
of the Muscle Soft Crew" popped up (
http://www.musclesoft.de/combatman/sindex.html ) so I had downloaded
DV-Tool version 0.53 freeware & tested it out quickly.

At first, DVTools cluttered interface scared me, and I couldn't get
anything to work, but then I realized all I needed to do was click the
"Merge Files" radio button in "File Processor 2.62" mode and then
select the epsilon icon three times to choose the three test mpg files
to merge. (DVtools seems to "split" the results also but I couldn't
see any difference between files "merged" and files "merged and
splitted" (sic). If you know what a "splitted file" is (sic), then let
us know.

The good news is that DVTools seems to accept the original test mov,
mpg, and wmv files. Better yet, DVTools seems to be able to write out
mpg, mov, and wmv files so the actual file format of either the input
or output files doesn't seem to be a problem.

Based on this, appears we can quickly drop the need to run TMPGEnc to
translate these files to MPEG.

Even though DV-Tool seems to fit out needs, I will still test out the
recommended programs because you took the time to suggest them and
that is an indication they are better than whatever it is that I could
come up with on my own.

I'll let you know what happens with Camel MPEGJoin and Maya Studio
EOVideo.

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

The good news is that DVTools seems to accept the original test mov,

mpg, and wmv files. Better yet, DVTools seems to be able to write out
mpg, mov, and wmv files so the actual file format of either the input
or output files doesn't seem to be a problem.

Actually, DVTool seemed to only work on the mpg files.

It READ all the files, mind you; and it WROTE out the desired file
names (e.g., merged.mov, merged.wmv, and merged.mpg); but it seems
only the MPEG-1 files were actually merged.

That is, even though there was NO ERROR whatsoever elicited by DVTool
when we attempted to merge wmv or mov files, it didn't actually merge
them. Worse, it wrote out a file called merged.mov or merged.wmv, but,
apparently they were mpg files despite the naming conventions.

So that puts TMPGEnc back on the charts as it can convert the wmv and
mov files to mpg so that DVTool would then actually merge the
resultant mpg files into a single mpg file.

 

[Rick Merrill]

Actually, DVTool seemed to only work on the mpg files.

It READ all the files, mind you; and it WROTE out the desired file
names (e.g., merged.mov, merged.wmv, and merged.mpg); but it seems
only the MPEG-1 files were actually merged.

That is, even though there was NO ERROR whatsoever elicited by DVTool
when we attempted to merge wmv or mov files, it didn't actually merge
them. Worse, it wrote out a file called merged.mov or merged.wmv, but,
apparently they were mpg files despite the naming conventions.

So that puts TMPGEnc back on the charts as it can convert the wmv and
mov files to mpg so that DVTool would then actually merge the
resultant mpg files into a single mpg file.

Are you intending to put the result on a DVD or on a CD as .MPG
files? (A DVD will need .VOB files ...)

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

Are you intending to put the result on a DVD or on a CD as .MPG
files? (A DVD will need .VOB files ...)

We were hoping to create a self-playing DVD.

Once we have the hour-long mpg file, what tool would you suggest to
convert that hour-long mpg file into a DVD VOB file so that it would
play as soon as it is inserted into a DVD player?

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

Not freeware but this can do exactly as you want
http://www.eo-video.com/

This Maya Studio all-in-one player, joiner, & converter apparently has
a 30-day trial period on the converter (unlimited on the full-screen
player).

The eovideo, version 1.36 player/converter/joiner says it can create
mpg, avi, or wav files (which we hadn't considered yet) so that is a
potential plus. Another possible plus is that eovideo says it can
support the addition of subtitles - which would enhance our project.

I first went right to the JOINER tab to join my three test files but I
was dumbstruck by the fact there was no selection mechanism to choose
the files to join (unlike all the other programs tested to date).
There was only a way to join files & to convert them (to AVI, MPG, or
WAV) but there was no way to SELECT the files to be converted or
joined.

To join mulitple MPG, WAV, AVI, MOV, etc. files, we soon found out
that you can't just select the files to join; instead, you have to
create something they call a "playlist" (so I'll call it that too). To
do this you apparently click on the eovideo EXPLORER tab and select
the three test MPG files and then drag them over to a playlist pane
(otherwise the next step fails) & then hit File, Save As,
"Playlist1.eop".

You then move on from the explorer and playlist tabs to the PLAYER tab
to see if your playlist actually worked (my first few tests didn't
work at all probably because I tried to save the selected files into
the playlist without dragging them into the playlist pane). The
eovideo player has a button to skip to each of the three test files in
the playlist (they call them "clips" so I will too) and a button to
skip frame by frame and another button to set what they call "in
marks" and "out marks".

Once you have a playlist containing the clips to be joined, you can
move on to the JOINER tab, select the playlist file, and then hit the
JOIN button. Unfortunately, every single time we did so, we got a
strange "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library" " error:

Runtime Error!
Program: "C:\programs\editors\art_class\eo_video\Eo.exe"
This application has requested the Runtime terminate it in an unusual
way. Please contact the application's support team for more
information.

We are art students, not programmers. We know generally what C++ is
(it's a programming language, right?) but (what did we do to terminate
it? We were pretty stumped, and as we kept trying to join the files,
we found half the time we'd get the runtime error, and half the time
the eo-video program would run and create a joined mpg file. Go
figure.

You'd think we were home free (just run eo-video twice more than you
need to) but we found out the resultant joined mpg file would play
fine in the eo-video player but would be black in Windows Media Player
and the positional slider bar would not move (although all the sound
would be there so we knew it was playing somehow somewhere) and
finally, just as the joined video ended, it would show a jumpy couple
of frames from mid-way in the joined mpeg. Go figure.

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

You'd think we were home free (just run eo-video twice more than you

need to) but we found out the resultant joined mpg file would play
fine in the eo-video player but would be black in Windows Media Player
and the positional slider bar would not move (although all the sound
would be there so we knew it was playing somehow somewhere) and
finally, just as the joined video ended, it would show a jumpy couple
of frames from mid-way in the joined mpeg. Go figure.

Oh oh. I hit the Free Agent SEND button instead of the SAVE button.
Sorry for sending that last message before I completed it.

Up until now we only tested eo-video with our existing test mpg files
but we had to give up on this mpg approach. Besides eo-video's very
annoying habit of jumping forward as the top window on your screen
every ten seconds (just like those spyware popups do), it kept
throwing those C++ runtime errors (whatever they are) and every fifth
or tenth time we invoked it, it crashed on us in Windows XP SP2
saying:

EO Video Player/Converter/Joiner
EO Video Player/Converter/Joiner has encountered a problem and needs
to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. .... Please tell
Microsoft about this problem.

Things seemed to go better with our test wmv files. Once we created a
playlist of three wmv files, we hit the CONVERTER tab which not only
converted them to MPG but also joined them (notice this intuitive
joining option was in the previously unused CONVERTER tab and NOT in
the JOINER tab). Thankfully, when we played the resulting wmv-to-mpg
converted and joined file in Windows Media Player, both the sound and
video did display!

Likewise with our MOV files. In the converter tab pops up an OUTPUT
button with the option set to "Convert/Join entire Playlist to one
output file" (it could even create multiple output files of specified
cut length).

We really wanted this program to work, but, while it worked quite
nicely on our wmv and mov test files, for our main bread and butter
MPG files it was very frustratingly useless.

All in all, for joining multiple mpg clips, eo-video was both the most
promising and most dissapointing program tested. We'll try the Camel
tool (although Camel only handles MPG files so we still need to
convert our MOV and WMV files before using them in Camel).

 

[Ken Maltby]

We really wanted this program to work, but, while it worked quite
nicely on our wmv and mov test files, for our main bread and butter
MPG files it was very frustratingly useless.

All in all, for joining multiple mpg clips, eo-video was both the most
promising and most dissapointing program tested. We'll try the Camel
tool (although Camel only handles MPG files so we still need to
convert our MOV and WMV files before using them in Camel).

This thread makes me think we should pay our teachers more,
(even though I know most are over paid, and way over praised.)

Give the free trial of VideoReDo a try for your MPEGs,
www.VideoReDo.com

Why are you just joining clips into one big kluge anyway? If
your intent is to create a DVD or to do any editing at all, then
having a bunch of small clips is to be preferred over one big
video clip/file. What Editing and/or Authoring software will
you be using during your summer school project?

Luck;
Ken

 

[Sondra R. Wilson]

Give the free trial of VideoReDo a try for your MPEGs,
www.VideoReDo.com

Why are you just joining clips into one big kluge anyway? If
your intent is to create a DVD or to do any editing at all, then
having a bunch of small clips is to be preferred over one big
video clip/file. What Editing and/or Authoring software will
you be using during your summer school project?

One by one we're starting to nod off (running low on supplies stop
only two of five left operational stop request resupply stop send
caffiene stop), but I'm still here to answer your questions. We
appreciate the help as we never did this before, ever, and we have to
get it done (failure is not an option).

For our ART101 Introduction to Art Appreciation class, we have to do a
video skit covering at least 36 different art works (out of a given
list of about 100) covering a dozen different categories.

Not knowing anything about the technoilogy, the five of us broke the
project down into sections and it's my lot (we drew straws, actually,
we drew lipstick ... ruby red was the loser, me) to build the DVD
assemblage.

What I have to work with are 59-second clips from people's
point-and-shoot digital cameras (mostly mov files), longer
uncompressed video avi's imported from a camcorder, plus much shorter
wmv & mpg files downloaded from the web.

As planned, we built a storyboard, reshot some of the intervening
scenes explaining the upcoming sections, and collected all the files
into one large batch list with descriptive scene names like:
local_rotting_civil_war_statue.mov
stupid_commentary_by_lisa.avi
ugly_old_lady_painting.wmv
more_stupid_commentary_by_lisa.avi
dreary_downloads_from_the_met.mpg
etc.

We *thought* we were home free .... all we needed to do was combine
these scores of files into a single video and burn it to a DVD (our
professor prefers DVD but said we could do it on CD or VHS if we
couldn't figure out how to create DVDs or if we ddn't have the
burner).

Since we have the DVD burner and since Lisa's key commentary avi's are
so unmanagebly huge and since we all want a copy of this for
posterity, we really wanted to "press" a DVD if we could.

We're close ... we figure the first step is planning it all out, the
second step is gathering the videos, then inserting the commentary,
and we're at the joining stage at this moment. Once we join them into
a single compressed mpg file (oh how I hate those huge AVIs) we hope
to burn them to DVD.

Someone mentioned we needed VOB files. We are familiar with them (sort
of) since we're well versed with copying (uh, backing up) our DVDs
with DVD Shrink 3.2. What we were hoping to do was somehow use the
reauthor mode of DVD Shrink to turn the one large mpg file (or maybe a
bunch of smaller mpg files as someone just suggested) into the
necessary IFO & VOB files that a DVD rightly needs.

To tell you the truth, we weren't sure HOW we were gonna get the
MPEG-1 files into VOB & IFO files but we were gonna hit that this
weekend (we do have until Thursday to hand this in). We've been
running blind since this project started two weeks ago and somehow we
managed to hit all our due dates in the syllabus so we hope to begin
to figure out how to convert the mpg file to DVD as soon as we get all
the files into a single MPEG-1 file. (Someone said DVD is MPEG-2 so
we're likely to have to tackle the MPEG-1 to MPEG-2 conversion next if
that is indeed the case).

Anyway, I hope I'm not rambling on too much to answer your question
(everyone in my "squad" thinks I have Hyperactive Attention Deficit
Disorder but only I know it's really the massive quantities of
caffiene talking!).