How to Combine Videos

If you are having problems downloading large files or videos, you can help speed up the downloading process by using a download accelerator software utility. You will find more information on the various types of download utilities in the Using a Download Accelerator post.

Now, what do you do with all those many small videos you downloaded? 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. 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 on page 2). 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 videos 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 AVI/MPEG/RM/WMV Joiner. This utility will work with all Windows platforms, right up to 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. 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 important 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. As an example, let’s say you have downloaded all the files for a specific lesson from my site, including perhaps a .pdf file, a zipped file, a graphic and several videos. All the lesson files should be saved in one folder; a sub-folder can then be created for the videos within the main lesson folder, storing and unzipping the videos to this subfolder. If you start by being organized, then you won’t have to organize yourself later, will you?

Now, you are asking how do you unzip or unpack a video. Usually a zipped video will have an .exe extension or it will be in zipped format.

• Open Windows Explorer.
• Navigate to the folder where you saved your videos.
• right click on the file name of the video you want to unpack or unzip.
• 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).

You are now ready to combine your videos for ease of viewing either with Windows Media Player or any software utility that will combine videos for you.

With a combination of a download accelerator and a video joiner, you will have the best of both worlds – downloading files faster and then being able to join the small videos together into larger files for ease of viewing.