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Strange Digital Video Problem

F

FlamingRug

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 6, 2012
3
0
Recently I lost a whole lot of data due to a backup drive imploding during a format and clean install of OSX on my macbook. I had a bunch of home video MTS files that were among the lost. Using the recovery software Data Rescue 3 (which was amazingly successful in general) I got what looks to be all of the video data back, however with one very strange caveat.

Many of the recovered MTS files have been randomly broken up into smaller clips, the majority of which are 1 second in length. The recovery software put them all in sequential order (thank god) so I don't have to sort through and order the 2.5k clips.

So essentially what I need is something that I can use to quickly batch merge MTS files into a single clip. Does anybody have any experience with any programs that have this capability? Whether it be a standalone program, or part of a video editing program I am game, since I should probably get into editing to make something watchable out of these home videos.

I appreciate any suggestions!
 
ppc_michael

ppc_michael

Guest
Apr 26, 2005
1,498
2
Los Angeles, CA
Theoretically, just concatenating them should work. You can do this via Terminal like so:

cat part1.mts part2.mts part3.mts > combined.mts

Where part1.mts, part2.mts, part3.mts (and so on) are the individual segments, and combined.mts is the filename for which to save the output.

Sometimes this can result in strange behavior when playing back the output, so if using cat isn't good enough, you could also try tsMuxer.

Worth mentioning: either of these solutions combine the streams without re-encoding, meaning you will not lose any quality.
 
F

FlamingRug

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 6, 2012
3
0
The terminal trick worked wonders! It couldn't have been easier! Thank you very much for the response and the info.

The only thing that would make this better is if you can concatenate the contents of an entire folder into one mts file without having to type out each file name. Or perhaps a shorthand way of concatenating tons of files with sequential names (m1, m2, m3, m4 etc...). This is the first time I have messed with terminal so I am as newbie as you can get.

I had previously tried TSMuxer, but couldn't get it to work.
 
Last edited:
F

FlamingRug

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 6, 2012
3
0
Aha! by simply loading up all the MTS files I want to concatenate in the same directory and using "cat *.mts >> newfile.mts" it stitches them all together. Thank goodness the recovery software has them all sequentially named and they are all in time order!

There are definitely some visual artifacts using this method, but the output plays smoothly, which is more that I could ask for considering I am stitching together hundreds of 1 second clips that were somehow artificially ripped apart.
 
V

VoxMac

macrumors newbie
Dec 24, 2009
24
0
Belgium
ppc_michael said:
Theoretically, just concatenating them should work. You can do this via Terminal like so:

cat part1.mts part2.mts part3.mts > combined.mts

Where part1.mts, part2.mts, part3.mts (and so on) are the individual segments, and combined.mts is the filename for which to save the output.

Sometimes this can result in strange behavior when playing back the output, so if using cat isn't good enough, you could also try tsMuxer.

Worth mentioning: either of these solutions combine the streams without re-encoding, meaning you will not lose any quality.
Click to expand...
Why those everybody point to video help, while my initial (and official) post on tsmuxer is on MacRumors ?:confused:
 
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