Combine videos with mencoder

[daviddoria]

I'm trying to concatenate a bunch of videos in a directory. I've used this before:

mencoder -of mpeg -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video -o combined.mpg *

but I'm getting 'New video file has different resolution or colorspace than the previous one". I'm assuming thats because they aren't all the same size, etc. Is there anyway to tell it "convert with padding" to make them all the same size by padding with black space? Or is there a better way to do this?

Thanks,
Dave

[Lindy]

I generally do my vid's to dvd format==>format=dvd -vf scale=720:480 . Are the vid's you're trying to do all the same aspect ratio? If not that may cause some problems...

[daviddoria]

No they're not. I'd like it to work for arbitrary input videos. Windows Movie Maker seems to deal with this without a problem, I can just "drag and drop" the videos into a timeline and it magically does exactly what I'm looking for... seems odd that I can't do it at all in linux.

[kromberg]

Both mencoder and ffmpeg need to have the source files be in the same audio and video formats to concat them. You need to do that first, before you can concat them. Some of the GUI frontends for mencoder and ffmpeg will do that for you.