Several WMV files to join - best way?

Viddy wrote on 11/13/2009, 11:22 AM
Hi there

I have about 5 WMV files. They are each less than 15mins long. They are all the same excellent quality HD 1280x720 29.97fps renders that I created using Vegas Movie Studio Plat Pro 9. (i.e. they were all the renders from the Vegas timeline of various edited videos and are all exactly the same specs).

I would like to join these 4 or 5 WMVs into one long one. However I definitely do not want them re-encoded or reduced in quality whatsoever. They are perfect as they are but I just want to bolt them together.

Does anyone have any tried and tested methods to to this? I presume I can't re-import them into Vegas and join them that way as I presume this will involve re-encoding when rendering out/exporting etc. and therefore some loss of quality would occur.

The bottom line is that if I cannot join them without encoding and/or losing any quality then I guess they will have to stay as separate files.... but it would be nice if someone had a trusted way to join them, any advice please?

Many thanks

Viddy

Comments

Birk Binnard wrote on 11/13/2009, 3:43 PM
This is an excellent question to which I have no answer but my guess is it will turn out to be No - you can't merge multiple independent WMV files into one. WMV is a pretty complex internal format (variable bit rate based on dynamically changing content presentation) and I expect there are some headers that would get fouled up from a simple concatenation. I'm not aware that there is any reference material that documents the internal format of WMV files.

A quick way to test this is to open a DOS window and enter the command

big.wmv = file1.wmv + file2.wmv + file3.wmv

This simply concatenates the files into one. It's a vestige from the old DOS days when people wanted to combine several ASCII text files into one. You can specify as many files to combine as you like. But don't get your hopes up.
musicvid10 wrote on 11/13/2009, 5:31 PM
A search for "wmv joiner" at download.cnet.com brought up 93 hits.