Combine MOV video files

Question

I'm on Arch Linux 4.13.10 and I'd like to combine multiple .MOV files shot with a Canon EOS camera.

I tried to convert the files to transport streams (.ts files) using FFmpeg, as shown here, but sound was missing from the resulting file.

I'd prefer if the resulting file would be .mp4, but this is not strictly required.

How do I do this?

Answer 1

I succeeded merging the files using FFmpeg's demuxing feature. For .mp4 conversion, I had to explicitly convert the audio stream to avoid this error:

Could not find tag for codec pcm_s16le in stream #1, codec not currently supported in container

This is the command combining the files to merged.mp4:

ffmpeg -f concat -i files_to_combine.txt -vcodec copy -acodec aac -strict -2 -b:a 384k merged.mp4

If the output file can be also a .MOV file, the command is:

ffmpeg -f concat -i files_to_combine.txt -vcodec copy -acodec copy merged.MOV

Here's the content of the text file files_to_combine.txt:

file ./first_file.MOV
file ./second_file.MOV

---

If you get the error

Unsafe file name 'file with spaces.mov' files_to_combine.txt: Operation not permitted

and trust the file names, you can add -safe 0 to get around this error. See FFmpeg's man page:

ffmpeg -safe 0 -f concat ...

Shorter commands

Trying the same task five years later, I also had success with

ffmpeg -f concat -i files_to_combine.txt merged.mov

and

ffmpeg -f concat -i files_to_combine.txt -f mp4 merged.mp4

Answer 2

find *.MOV | sed 's:\ :\\\ :g'| sed 's/^/file /' > fl.txt; ffmpeg -f concat -i fl.txt -c copy output.mp4; rm fl.txt