Tutorials
Video Merging HowTo
Objective: We want to merge several videos with different format size and bitrate into a FHD WebM video stream.
The following shell commands accomplish that task (by using the tcsh!):
- We assume that the videos to be merged are in a directory named “videos”.
- We install the cmd line tool avconv from the libav package:
sudo apt-get install libav-tools
- First, we need to convert all separate files in the video directory into a consistent concatable video format (that is MPEG1):
foreach file ( videos/* ) avconv -i $file -s 1920x1080 -an -r 24 -b 20000k $file:r.mpeg end
- Secondly, we combine those converted videos into a single one, by simply concatenating them with the good old “cat” tool (works only for MPEG1 and some other formats like raw video):
cat videos/*.mpeg > video.mpeg
- Lastly, we convert the concatenated MPEG video into a WebM video. For a full HD resolution a bit rate of 2MBit/s is appropriate for the WebM codec:
avconv -i video.mpeg -b 2000k video.webm
Edit 05/2023: Newer versions of Ubuntu do not provide the package libav-tools any longer. Instead we install the package “ffmpeg” and use the tools “ffmpeg” for video or sound conversion and “ffplay” for playback.