How to : Merge Multi-part Movie DVDs and Bluray (Method 1)

[dvdcatalyst]

In a previous article I wrote about the Bluray conversion of Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition from Bluray, http://www.tools4movies.com/2012/03/...-ring-extended, and since the movie was on 2 discs, of course I ended up with 2 files.

There are a couple of different ways to make this movie (and similar split-movies) into a single video file. In this article I will document the steps for one of them.


Before we start:

There is a reason for why movies like this are split over multiple discs. Because of the length of the movie, almost 4 hours in this case, the movie is split over 2 discs to provide you with the best possible quality. While it is possible to put this movie on a single DVD or single Bluray, because these discs can only store so much information, the quality would be lower than that of a 2hour movie. And with this being a so-called high-profile (popular) movie, they wanted to make sure you were getting the best viewing experience they could possibly offer you.

When you are dealing with a long movie such as Lord of the Rings Extended Edition, or The Stand, Rose Red etc, the file-size is something you have to keep in mind. Devices such as the NOOKcolor/NOOKtablet and Kindle Fire do not like video files that are larger than 2GB. If you are using a device with a memorycard to store your videos on, you will run into similar limitations as well. If you decide to stitch the 2 parts together into a single file, you might end up with a file that can only be played from the internal memory of your device (Xoom/Xyboard/Playbook) or you will have to use something like MP4 Streaming Server to bypass the file-size limitation and stream the movie from your computer.

When I converted the discs of Lord of the Rings individually, the sum of the file-size for the 2 parts ended up at 4.27GB in size, and this is of course the same for the movie in a single file.

If you do want to convert the movie to fit within a 2GB filesize, the visual quality will need to be reduced by more than half.


4.2GB for this movie comes to about 2600Kbps




to get the almost 4 hour long movie to fit within a 2GB filesize limit, you would have to reduce the video quality to about 1000Kbps




So how do we join/merge the 2 parts?
As mentioned, there are a couple of different methods to do this.
In this article, I will describe the steps on how to do it with DVD Catalyst 4.

First, convert the 2 parts you want, using the same settings.

Since I already converted Fellowship of the Ring earlier ( http://www.tools4movies.com/2012/03/...-ring-extended ), I will be using the 2 video files that DVD Catalyst 4 created.

Start DVD Catalyst 4 using the shortcut on your desktop:

In order to merge/join the 2 video files from before, 2 settings changes are needed in DVD Catalyst 4.

In Global Settings > Advanced, enable the "enable join for non-avi" setting (the files I created earlier are MP4's)

then, since the files have already been converted using DVD Catalyst 4, so there are no black borders, turn off cropping in Global Settings > Borders

After that, drag your 2 MP4 files onto DVD Catalyst 4:

Select the top file by clicking on it, then hold down the shift-key on your keyboard and click on the second file.

If both files have the same settings, you should be able to click on the "Join selection into 1 file" button

Once you tap on that, DVD Catalyst 4 will add the second listing after the first one. The playlength will match that of both files' playlengths combined.

Now just start a conversion as normal.

Since we are using the same settings as what we used to create the individual video files, the quality-loss of a second conversion is nearly non-existent. The conversion will take a little while, but it should be a bit faster than what it was when you first converted them from Bluray.


(for LOTR The Two Towers and Return of the King, I will be using different methods of joining the multiple parts together, so keep an eye on the news-section on www.tools4movies.com over the next few days.)

and after the conversion is done, you end up with one large, single-file movie.

Using this method, the joined version of Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition ended up slightly over 4GB in size.

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