Black On Stuff

I’m using a lot of free software tools to accomplish various tasks at home and I do not always remember what I used last time. This is why I have decided to write it down here, to use it later for reference.

I had a simple task: to join several mpeg 2 files that were taken by a video camera into a single one and add my own mp3 file as audio for the final file. I had 43 files from our team building 2 weeks ago that needed to be compiled in a nice old style mute movie.

In AVIcodec the files looked like this (video is MPEG2 SVCD/DVD, audio doesn’t matter because I’m not using it):

I tried several applications but some of them just crashed (I’m using Vista), some of them recompiled the frames, making a different quality, others just didn’t work. The one that worked for me flowlessly is called Avidemux.

What I like at this application:

- it worked for me (didn’t crashed like others)
- merges the mpeg files, but also you can add your own custom mp3 sound
- has a auto configuration option that configures your output video and audio based on the loaded files