How do I unite cd1 to cd2? Is Kino the tool?

[Joel Oliver]

>
> I have attempted so many commands that I am confused now.  I don't remember 
> the correct post you mention, however, I have cut and pasted (to keep from 
> making an error) everything I have tried, and nothing has had a positive 
> result so far.  Additionally, I don't understand the term 'cat them 
> together'.  I will google that term when I finish reading the posts.
>
> Thanks for your patience.
>
> Steven
>
>   
You can't cat (concatenate) .avi files (which you have)  You must use 
avimerge (part of avifile-utils I believe) You need to install this 
program first to get avimerge. So:

sudo apt-get install avifile-utils

OK, now cd to the directory that the two .avi files are in and run the 
command:

avimerge -o outputfile.avi -i inputfile1.avi inputfile2.avi 
inputfile3.avi etc.

thats -o and -i the letter meaning the file "outputfile.avi" will be the 
combined files of the input files (Can be two, three, ten....)

A good habit would be to enclose the filenames in quotes because your 
filenames have spaces in them.  Or just goto the directory with the two 
files and rename them.  Like make the Jerusalem I.avi file just 1.avi 
and Jerusalem II.avi 2.avi respectively. That would make the quotes 
unnecessary... Like:

avimerge -o Jerusalem.avi -i 1.avi 2.avi

That will fix your avi's together....


Now not to confuse you further, but if you had two or more text files 
(plain old text, not .doc or .odt...) you can "stick them together" with 
the cat command.  Like:

cat text1.txt text2.txt text3.txt > combined.txt

OK.... So the file combined.txt has all three text files in the 
specified order all in one file.... Now for .mpg, .mpeg, and .vob files 
(Which are all MPEG compressed movies or video) you cannot use 
avimerge.... Just treat them as text files like above and use the cat 
command to stick these types of video together.

cat video1.mpg video2.mpg video3.mpg > combinedvideo.mpg

So... The "greater than sign" stands for redirecting the output to the 
file specified.  This overwrites the file as well.  Lets say you just 
combined three MPEG videos together and find out part 4 just came out 
and you want to add it to the final movie.  There's three ways to go 
about this and only one makes sense.  I'll list some examples:

Example 1:
    You can just go at it again:

cat video1.mpg video2.mpg video3.mpg video4.mpg > combinedvideo.mpg


    This makes no sense as you need to "start over" and parse through 
all of the first three videos again... You already did this the first time.

Example two:
    You can cat the combined.mpg and then the video4.mpg together but 
you better rename the combined.mpg file or it will destroy it.

cat combined.mpg video4.mpg > newcombined.mpg

    Again, you need to parse through the whole thing.... also you need 
to rename the output file... Still not a good idea.

Example 3: (And the correct way):
    Just tack the video4.mpg file onto the end of the combined.mpg file 
without overwriting it... How? use to >> together which appends w/o 
overwriting:

cat video4.mpg >> combined.mpg



Hope this helps.  Of course your movies are NOT MPEG video, so you can't 
simply cat them together.  You need to use avimerge!  But I explained 
the cat command because you asked.