How to Combine Videos

Do you find when you purchase lessons in video format that you are downloading 5, 10, 20 or even more small videos? The reason for that is that when preparing videos for download, most people will try to break them down into smaller file sizes to make downloading easier for those who are on dial-up or have problems downloading large files. So you may have a lot of downloads of video files from various sites but each individual video is actually very small.

You have several options for viewing the videos:

1. View them one at a time. If they are .exe files usually they have a player with them such as the Camtasia player so they will play automatically. Just double click on the file name and it will play. Close the file after it has completed playing. Repeat this process for any other videos.

2. Unzip or unpack them and load them into Windows Media Player for continuous play (see unzipping instructions further on in this article). I find with Windows Media Player quite often even if the videos are in 1, 2, 3 order in the files area, you will view video 1, it will skip down to video 6, back to video 2, etc. I have never been able to continuously play videos from the first to the last video in a contiguous order, without starting each video individually from the list.

3. And the last suggestion is you can combine videos together using a video combining utility.

It can be very frustrating to view five, ten or more 2 or 3-minute videos, opening video 1, closing it, opening video 2, etc. but you can combine two, three or as many as you want into one complete video if you use a software utility to combine videos. There are several different sites that offer software to combine videos, but the software that I have been using and do recommend is the BoilSoft Video Joiner. This utility works with all Windows platforms up to and including Vista and Windows 7.

The upside is that the software is very easy to use, there is literally no learning curve, but the downside is that is not free, but for the small $20.00 price you pay, it is well worth purchasing if you wish to join video files together.

After unzipping the videos you do have the option of deleting the smaller files after combining them into a larger file, or you can retain copies of the smaller files as well as the new larger combined file.

One thing to be aware of is that when combining videos, the videos you are combining must have the same speed and frame rate or they will not combine. But most videos in a group of videos from one site will usually be produced with identical speed and frame rates, so that is not usually a problem.

If you unzip or unpack videos and then plan on joining them together, I would highly recommend that you create a folder for each set of videos as it will make life much easier to find them at a later date. If you start by being organized, then you won’t have to organize yourself later, will you? (see the Organized or Confused post for information on setting up your own personal folder system.)

As an example, let’s say you have downloaded videos from my site that are for a specific lesson. All the lesson files should be saved in one folder; a sub-folder can be created for the videos within the main lesson folder, storing and unzipping the videos to this sub-folder. ? Now, you are asking how do you unzip or unpack a video. Usually a zipped video will have an .exe extension. If you open Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder where you have saved your videos, find the video you want to unpack, right click on the file name, follow the prompts to unzip (or unpack) the video. I would recommend simply unzipping it into the same folder. If there is a player such as the Camtasia player included with the zip file, delete the Camtasia player as you do not need several copies of the same player. I would recommend, however, that you do keep one copy of the player as you may want to use it at some future time. If you do not have any extra unzipping software you will not have the option to extract when you right click.

A workaround with Windows XP is to copy all the files I want to combine to a new folder so you do not change the existing ones. Once you have copied the videos into the new folder right click on each video and then change the .exe extension to .zip and extract them deleting the player as I they are unzipped. You can also use the built-in zip utilities that are part of the Vista and Windows 7 platforms if you do not have unzipping software.