Join Multiple Video files in Windows

There are times when you get multiple files in small chunks of the same video clip or movie.
What do you do? Offcourse you play the files in your media player.

So what is the problem?
The media player disturbs the flow of the movie after each file. Even if the files are properly arranged in the list of the player, there will always be a small pause.
What's more annoying is the number of files required for a single movie.

The following 3 tricks will help you to combine multiple video files (only mpg files, other formats may work with the second trick).

Update: There are comments that this works for joining flash video (flv) files as well. These are the type of files you can download from YouTube.
If you get timecode corruption after merging FLV files, check out this comment to avoid timecode problems when joining flv files.

This small compilation won't make you sweat. It's really easy to try. Give it a go if you are interested.

Trick 1

1. Open a blank text file.
2. Type copy /b *.mpg FullMovie.mpg
3. Save the file with a .Bat extension.
Let's say you saved the text file as Joiner.Bat.
4. Now Copy and Paste this Joiner.Bat file in a folder which contains more than one mpg files.
5. Double click the Joiner.Bat file.

A combined file named FullMovie.mpg is created from all the mpg files in the folder.
Based on the limited testing I did, this trick didn't work with avi and wmv file formats.
However, you can try and check if this works for other file formats.

Below is a small video demo (click to play) of this trick

Trick 2

This is an old trick I used a lot.
1. Here, you'll have to add all the small mpg files into a zip file. This can be done using Winzip.
2. A very important thing to remember here is the files must be zipped without any compression.
3. Arrange the order of the files in the zip.
4. Rename the zip file as an mpg file.
5. That's it! Click and enjoy the movie.

This works pretty well with mpg files. You can try this with other file formats. Please comment or reply back if this trick works for any of the other formats.


Trick 3

The third and final method is a superset of the first method.
Here, the command prompt is used to join files. An advantage over the first trick is you can specify the files you want to join.

1. Click Start >> Run.
2. Type cmd and press Enter. This will open the command prompt.
3. In the command prompt, type
copy /b "D:\FirstClip.mpg" + "D:\SecondClip.mpg" "D:\FullMovie.mpg"
where FirstClip.mpg and SecondClip.mpg are the video files to join and FullMovie.mpg is the resultant combined file.
You can specify any number of files to join.
Also notice I have typed the entire file path in the above command.
4. Press enter and the files will be joined.


Using Other Softwares
Check out the tools below that may just do the trick for you (Got them from reader comments) :
a. Movica
b. AviDemux
c. FLV Binder
d. Andy's FLV Joiner