[MPlayer-users] Combining video clips using mplayer

[James Lancaster]

On Thursday 06 February 2003 05:47, you wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
>
> On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 11:09:37AM +0000, Giles RC Morant wrote:
>  > On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 19:15, Nick Hatch wrote:
>  > > I'm trying to find a way to combine video clips using mplayer. I want
>  > > to add a standard two second title screen to a bunch of movies. I've
>  > > created the animated sequence using gimp, and exported the .jpg files
>  > > and created a .avi movie file using mencoder. How can I append this
>  > > animation to the beginning of a prerecorded movie?
>  > >
>  > > It seems that this would be very easy to do, but I can't find the
>  > > options to do it. If it isn't possible to do with mplayer, are there
>  > > any other tools to do it easily?
>  > >
>  > > Thanks for any help.
>  > >
>  > > -Nick
>  >
>  > There's probably some clever way to do it with mencoder, but the
>  > easiest way is to use one of the many little tools that comes with
>  > "transcode":
>  > avimerge -o big.avi -i one.avi two.avi three.avi
>
> 	i did this for two (600 and 130 meg) avi files and then i've reencodec
> it with mencoder to fit in 700M. what i got was a desynced sound for the
> second half of the movie, and i don't know who to blame, avimerge or
> mencoder (ofcourse i blame avimerge :P ). I'd just doublecheck the resulted
> file if I were you.
>

What you may have to do is rencode it. I usually do an edit via a script (or 
by hand using cat file1.avi file2.avi > dest.avi (and the script does the 
same thing, but I don't have to do the startpos and endpos by hand)) I have 
found that regenerating the index (the mencoder -idx (or -forceidx (see 
below)) dest.avi dest-with-index.avi) doesn't work, unless you recode the 
file. (Of course that may very well be due to the extra avi headers and such 
stuck in the file from the cat, and subsequent rencoding)

Another thing that happens if you don't rencode and use -forceidx which will 
work the index tends to take you to places inbetween the keyframes (==VERY 
ugly) 

I don't see much loss in quality, but most of the stuff I cut comes from tv, 
and gets recorded at very high bitrate (for mpeg4 at that resolution)

James L 

>  > You need to ensure the frame rates and resolution are the same &c., but
>  > if not, transcode is probably the easiest tool with which to
>  > change these.
>  >
>  > Just type transcode into google.
>  >
>  > --
>  > Giles RC Morant <giles.morant at dur.ac.uk>