Joining videos using the command line

Question

I've had a little mishap with the external harddisk and I've had to restore some files.
Now I have a bunch of video fragments that I'd like to join up again.

I can play the fragments using VLC just fine.
So I went here: https://wiki.videolan.org/How_to_Merge_and_Transcode_Multiple_Videos/
and followed the instructions.

The commandline for joining 2 files with the same encoding is:

vlc c:\file1.avi file2.avi 
  --sout "#gather:std{access=file,mux=ts,dst=all.ts}" 
  --sout-keep

However nothing happens; an empty all.ts file gets created.

 Directory of C:\PROGRA~1\VideoLAN\VLC

all.ts
               1 File(s)              0 bytes
               0 Dir(s)  108,900,364,288 bytes free

How do I get vlc to actually create a file with data in it?

If I use the transcoding option:

vlc -vvv c:\dir24.avi\fil57.avi c:\dir24.avi\fil58.avi
  --sout-keep 
  --sout=#gather:transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=1024,scale=1,acodec=mp4a,ab=
192,channels=6}:standard{access=file,mux=ts,dst=out.mpg} 
  --sout-all

I get the following error:

How do I get vlc to join the two files? Note that I do not know the actual encoding of the files.

Solution 1

I just needed to do this myself. Your unanswered question helped. Here's what I did:

vlc c:\file1.avi file2.avi 
  --sout "#gather:std{access=file,dst=newFile.avi}" 
  --sout-keep

The example on the VLC wiki page you linked is mux-ing .ps into .ts. I dropped the mux altogether as it wasn't needed in my case. Then pointed it to a destination (dst=) having proper file extension.

Solution 2

You must close VLC before running your newly merged file!

Windows: An alternative method is to use:- copy /B filename1.avi + filename2.avi resultFile.avi

Comments

[DavidPostill]

This is not an answer to the original question. To critique or request clarification from an author, leave a comment below their post - you can always comment on your own posts, and once you have sufficient reputation you will be able to comment on any post.

[Gyan]

It is. The OP imitated the VLC doc sample command line, which failed. @kevin-l modified that sample command for AVI files, as described, and it works.

[JohnnyBob]

Rexa's simple method works with Windows to join two AVI files into one. But the new resulting file only plays the first, not the second. I tried both VLC and WMP. So somehow the AVI envelope must be edited as well, to change the length/time or whatever(?).