Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

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.