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Is there a (at best free) solution to merge AVI-Files in Mac OS X Lion without the need to recode them? (Until Snow Leopard I used D-Vision 3, which won't run on Lion because it's PPC.)

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  • By "merge", do you mean combine in sequence?
    – Mechanical snail
    Commented Aug 3, 2011 at 20:19
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    Also, we need to know the video format (motion JPEG? H.264?) to know whether this is possible.
    – Mechanical snail
    Commented Aug 3, 2011 at 20:19
  • @Mechanical: Yes, by merge I mean join them seamlessly in sequence. We can take as granted, that all files share the same framerate, codec and resolution. Used codec is mainly following the MPEG-4 standard such as Xvid. In fact it is possible as it was before Lion as well as it is with Windows. I'm looking for a tool that also runs on Lion.
    – Chris
    Commented Aug 3, 2011 at 22:43
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    In general, ffmpeg the tool for this.
    – Mechanical snail
    Commented Aug 3, 2011 at 22:49
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    I started the bounty only because @w00t's answer is godsend — it probably saved me few $/€'s worth of actual money; and it would had saved a lot of time & effort if I just had stumbled on it earlier…
    – Jari Keinänen
    Commented Aug 31, 2011 at 12:45

7 Answers 7

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To make your copy of avidemux2.app work, simply open the application bundle (show package contents in finder) and remove the files libxml.2.dylib and libiconv.2.dylib from the Contents/Resources/lib folder.

This will make avidemux2 use the versions that ship with Lion and which seem to work just fine.

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    Thanks, good information. Did not know I could delete them instead of replacing them.
    – Chris
    Commented Aug 13, 2011 at 22:49
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This works for me:

cat part1.avi part2.avi part3.avi > tmp.avi && mencoder -forceidx -oac copy -ovc copy tmp.avi -o output.avi && rm -f tmp.avi

Then output.avi should not only have the whole content but also have the indexes recalculated so the whole movie plays.

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    Genius. And worked for me as well.
    – peelman
    Commented Dec 6, 2012 at 3:51
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    NB: The command line is quite long so be careful when copying it.
    – Umar Farooq Khawaja
    Commented Mar 9, 2013 at 10:59
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    Worked like a charm! Excellent answer.
    – Umar Farooq Khawaja
    Commented Mar 9, 2013 at 11:15
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    -bash: mencoder: command not found. Download ffmpegXbinaries20060307.zip unzip and then copy mencoder to /usr/local/bin and then above works wonderful. THANKS!
    – westondeboer
    Commented Jun 29, 2013 at 17:03
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    @westondeboer If you've got macports installed, sudo port install mplayer
    – Joel Mellon
    Commented Sep 5, 2013 at 1:29
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Avidemux is an open source tool for editing/combining videos, and there is a Mac port:

http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/

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    Thanks. Avidemux does not support Lion at the moment. Avidemux uses a lion-incompatible version of the library libiconv.2.dylib. I got it working by replacing the library with a patched version from GnuCash: bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=192432
    – Chris
    Commented Aug 5, 2011 at 10:44
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Try this Lion-compatible Version of D-Vision 3: D-Vision 3 (Intel)

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    Where did you get this version from? I'm not that comfortable with downloading programs from unknown sources.
    – Chris
    Commented Aug 12, 2011 at 17:49
  • Actually the author's site has a universal binary: objectifmac.com/dvision.php
    – w00t
    Commented Aug 13, 2011 at 15:01
  • @w00t: You're right. In fact the D-Vision main app works on Lion, while joining AVIs with D-Vision does not. You can start it, select the tool to join AVIs, select your AVI-files and start the task. I checked "delete source files when task is finished" (as always) and then I got the Rosetta-error and also lost my source-files.
    – Chris
    Commented Aug 13, 2011 at 22:48
  • @Chris: actually I just copied the universal-binary-files from the newest D-Vision 4 beta into the old D-Vision 3 App-Bundle.
    – fheusel
    Commented Aug 18, 2011 at 7:31
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D-Vision will work with OS X Lion. Just use mencoder and not the default avimerge.

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  1. Download newest version of ffmpegX.
  2. Right click “Show Package Contents”
  3. Copy avimerge located in Contents > Resources > avimerge.
  4. Paste the avimerge file in the same location within D-Vision.app file. To do this, right click “Show Package Contents” at the "D-vision.app" icon and paste it in "Contents > Resources".

D-Vision will then work a treat in Lion OS X.

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Here is a way that requires absolutely no additional software. If you have OS X, you can do this. Open Terminal and do this:

cat /path/to/part1.avi /path/to/part2.avi > /path/to/where/you/want/whole.avi
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  • Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me.
    – rich
    Commented Dec 2, 2012 at 14:19
  • What do you mean by "it doesn't work"? You'll have to be more specific if you want some help.
    – bernk
    Commented Dec 4, 2012 at 9:36
  • This is great accept it doesn't work for me either.... I end up with only the first video in the output file (Mountain Lion)
    – neildeadman
    Commented Feb 1, 2013 at 21:14
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    This would probably only work for files that don't require any kind of header. To my knowledge, .avi files have a header so basically, this would only append the 2nd .avi file to the end of the first but the header information won't be there for it to be played.
    – Umar Farooq Khawaja
    Commented Mar 9, 2013 at 10:16
  • The output file has the size of the combined input files, but only the first video file plays. The avi player ignores the rest of the data.
    – SMBiggs
    Commented Jan 26, 2022 at 6:55

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