March 11th, 2009 | Category: Efficiency, Video Library | Author: Maddox

Plex has a great feature called “Stacking”. By naming your multi file content, Plex will play it back as one complete file.

For example, you may have the movie Spider-Man broken in half and in two AVI files. By naming them spider-man.cd1.avi and spider-man.cd2.avi, and turning on stacking in Plex, you’ll be good to go.

But… stacking is a pain in the butt, annoying, and in the end, your video library is ghetto because you have ONE movie broken into TWO files. And you don’t have to.

So I’m going to show you a couple of ways to take your two part AVI and merge them into a single movie file.

Method 1

First, go download ffmpegX and install it. Now open it up and select the TOOLS tab, then the join tab below it.

You’ll be prompted for your two files. Add your movie parts and select join. After a few minutes your two part movie will now be a single file and ready to join the rest of your movie library as a first class citizen.

Method 2

Method two uses the command line and while it looks more complicated its actually a lot easier since it doesn’t need third party software.

Open up the terminal and navigate to the directory containing your two video files. Next, use the simple cat command following the conventions below:

After a few minutes it will complete and you’ll have your single video file!

Merging your movie files together into a single video file keeps your library simple and easy to maintain. If you have another favorite way to merge your files or a way to do it on platforms other than OS X, please tell us in the comments.

1,306 comments

1,306 Comments so far

Kent March 12th, 2009 1:36 am

Nice hint, but, I’d say the command line version is a little risky – my understanding is it’ll screw up the container headers (they’ll have the wrong length etc) and, for some formats, you’ll not even be able to get the the second half of the movie.

My preferred (and much safer) solution is this:

Install Darwin Ports (I think you’ll need some of the Xcode tools from your install CD – the darwin ports website has good & simple instructions)
Open a terminal window
port -d install mplayer

(wait a long time for it to compile)
Now we make it all happen:

mencoder -o Spiderman.avi -ovc copy -oac copy Spiderman.cd1.avi Spiderman.cd2.avi

The above command will create a brand new avi file from scratch and just copy the audio and video streams from your source files (which takes only fractionally longer than copying the files – it isn’t actually transcoding anything).
Kent March 12th, 2009 1:38 am

Damn – no edit function.

The big downside of joining your movies in any manner is that later on if you want to search for subtitles from opensubtitles or anywhere else, the filename and size has changed completely, so finding the correct ones is problematic.

Further, you can obviously say goodbye to ever being able to seed this content again.
Maddox March 12th, 2009 2:12 am

Good points Kent. Typically, I actually use avimerge at the command line which follows the same patterns that mencoder does.

While cating does kinda of screw with headers, most modern players can handle it just fine.

As far as subs go, you can do the same thing with your subs. Since most sub files are flat text anyways, its not hard to merge them together. A little bit of effort to have a nice clean library.

Thanks!
sjobbels March 12th, 2009 6:03 am

And what about your subtitles? When you’ve downloaded a movie with 2 parts. You’ll normally download the subtitle that contains 2 parts and the same name. But when merging these 2 parts into one movie I assume that your subtitles will be out of sync… or??
Mark McRobie March 13th, 2009 3:51 am

When I used to use Windows I would use VirtualDub to join 2 AVI’s, however the resuting single file wouldn’t stream to my PS3.
Salar March 15th, 2009 1:10 pm

thanks for the tips, after using the ffmpegX software I got a file “The Godfather.avi.temp” is this right?
cyantist March 21st, 2009 11:02 pm

I’ve been using a util called D-Vision for quite a while now. It’s basically a gui for the tools mentioned above. It’s easy to use and does a good job with multi-part avi files.

Check it out:
http://www.objectifmac.com/dvision.php
Raindancing March 27th, 2009 8:29 am

@cyantist
Thanks for sharing D-Vision! I tried ffmpegX, and it kept hanging at the end. D-Vision worked beautifully.
xain09 March 27th, 2009 12:52 pm

Great tips. Thanks again:)
pippo April 21st, 2009 2:47 pm

Hi folks,

My advice would be to drop avi and use mkv. With mkvmerge, joining is as simple as “mkvmerge -o outfile infile1 +infile2 …”, you can include subtitles as well in several formats, and Plex works great with mkv.

ps. mkvmerge comes with a GUI, called mmg.