There comes times that you may want to combine a couple (or more) MPG video files into just one larger file. I had this case come up just recently.

I needed to decompile a dvd that I wanted to watch using my thumb drive. Unfortunately my thumb drive is only 2.0 Gigs and the movie was over 4 gigs. There are several ways to copy a DVD to your computer and I won't get into how to do this now. But I needed to copy it to my thumb drive in the original VOB structure that the DVD uses instead of one large file.

If you are familiar with DVDs and their layout you will know that they usually breakdown the movie into about 1 Gig VOB files.

At the end of the day after doing the decompiling I had all the original VOB files on my computer and , if you didn't know it, a VOB file is the same exact thing as a MPG file just with a different extension. 

So to "turn" them into MPGs I simply renamed each one of the VOB files to an extension of MPG. Now I had the MPG files I neded and I could copy them to my thumb drive seperately,  move them or watch them and then delete as needed. Cool deal I was all set.

But after all of this was done I still had the individual MPG files on my computer and could use them all combined into on movie file for use later. So how do we do this?

I did a quick Google search for "combine MPG files" and of course it came up with several programs that could do it, but they were not free or they were crippled in some way.

After thinking about it awhile I knew I could do something like this with Windows Movie Maker, but that was going to be a bit of a chore too. I have to import each one, select the output, etc, etc.

So I dug back into my old DOS userbrain and remembered that I could use the good old "Copy" command to combine files. So I did this and I was all set. No program to download, no Movie Maker stuff, just plain old add this file to this file stuff. :)

Here is how it is done.

If you have 2 or more MPG files that you want to combine simply go to your Windows  Start > Run icon. Click on it and type in CMD. You will then be presented with a new window.

You can then go to the directory that holds your files. If you don't know are not familiar with basic  DOS commands that Windows uses see here for a good listing on how to do this and what they all mean.  

Once you are in the directory (or Folder as Windows like to call it) you simply run the copy program and combine the files like this.

Type in "Copy" and then "/b"  (The "b" command tells it to use Binary mode, very important!") after this type in the names of the MPG files that you want to combine with a "+" (plus) sign after each one.  Its imparative that you type in the file names of your MPGs in the order that you want them combined. Then I entered the name of what Iwanted to movie to be called after I combined them.

In my case I had 4 MPG video files I wantred to combine so I typed in:

"copy /b 1.mpg + 2.mpg + 3.mpg + 4.mpg mymovie.mpg" (without the quotes). 

After it was done copying, and this could take some time if you are copying large files, I now had the movie all combined into one video file I could do with whatever I wanted.

No program to buy, no creating a video with Windows Movie Maker, jsut plain old DOS commands. You can use this with any video files without a probelm at all.

If you have any questions on this let me know.

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