Ubuntu – What software can join videos

software-recommendationvideovideo-editor

What's the best & easiest GUI software that can join a video that I have downloaded in several parts?

Best Answer

mkvtoolnix-gui

Notes:

there is no re-encoding involved, so the merging process takes only a
couple of seconds
it can merge other video formats, like avi, mp4, but the output is always mkv
it can't merge videos with different apect ratios

For more info see the documentation here

alt text

Quick how-to:

Click "add", select the first video, then click "append", then select the other videos to append. You can select multiple videos as long as you select them in order or you can append one by one. Then click "Start muxing". You might want to change the output filename. The other options are not really necessary for basic merging. Nevertheless, you can also add multiples subtitles in various formats or languages and also multiple audio tracks.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to join together multiple VOB files

The size of a .VOB container file is, by definition of the DVD specification, limited to 1 GByte (1048 MB).

If we need a file that contains a whole movie, then we need to convert these files to another container (e.g. xvid, MKV, plain MPEG etc.), e.g. by using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i snatch_1.vob -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -b 800k -g 300 -bf 2 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 128k snatch.avi ^{(from manpage)}

Concatenating video files can only be done with some formats (e.g. MPEG).

Ubuntu – Software to automatically download Youtube videos

I don't know about the first, but the second can be easily done with youtube-dl:

sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

I've copied the help text about formating here:

Video Format Options:
    -f, --format FORMAT        video format code, specifiy the order of
                               preference using slashes: "-f 22/17/18"
    --all-formats              download all available video formats
    --prefer-free-formats      prefer free video formats unless a specific one
                               is requested
    --max-quality FORMAT       highest quality format to download
    -F, --list-formats         list all available formats (currently youtube
                           only)

So you can use --max-quality to get the maximum quality format. On a personal note, I find youtube-dl very easy to use (I just type yo and Tab in terminal and it auto-completes it for me). It can also download every video by a specific channel and has a multitude of options.

I believe you can set it to continue downloads with the -c option and if you do that for a channel, it should download only new ones if in the same directory as the others were downloaded to, but have not tried it in practice. If you can, then you can run youtube-dl on a script and it will only download the files when there are new ones.