VMerger

This is a tool for labeling videos and merging them into one with FFmpeg, written in Bash.

"How's that work?"

You supply a text file containing each video you want to work with, plus the file name of the resulting video, which you then have to append a = to specify whether you want the videos to be merged with the (m)uxer method or the (f)ilter one:

[funnycompilation.txt]
intro.mp4
01_cat_falling.mp4
transition.mp4
02_sneeze.mp4
transition.mp4
03_workaccident.mp4
outro.mp4
WeeklyFunnyVideosCompilation.mp4=f

The script then feeds that to FFmpeg, which will then merge all these videos into one, producing a file named WeeklyFunnyVideosCompilation.mp4.

Now, to add labels to your videos, you can just append = to each entry and add the text for it, always remembering to surround them with single-quotes:

intro.mp4
01_cat_falling.mp4='Jumpscare'
transition.mp4
02_sneeze.mp4='Who Sneezes Like That??'
transition.mp4
03_workaccident.mp4='Uh Oh···'
outro.mp4
WeeklyFunnyVideosCompilation.mp4=f

Yes, the script also automatically skips the entries not marked with that symbol, leaving them to be worked on only during the merge part.

So in both cases, to render such video, the command for that would be:

$ vmerger.sh funnycompilation.txt

That's it! Dead-simple stuff :)

Differences Between the concat Muxer and Filter

• muxer: it won't eat all of your RAM and there won't be a need to re-encode the video and audio streams. However, all the videos must be in the exact same resolution, framerate, and codec.
• filter: requires a ton of RAM depending on how many videos you have and their quality and the final video must be re-encoded, however, here you can merge videos with different resolutions, refresh rates and even codecs.

Choose what fits your use-case the best.

This can be useful for things like video game soundtrack videos and compilation ones, because of how fast it is. No dependencies whatsoever, other than Bash, awk and FFmpeg. All of which should already come preinstalled in most distros.

Current Caveats

• File names with spaces are currently unsupported. This breaks the script as it's unable to handle such information properly.
• Since this runs solely on the command line, there's no timeline view, which makes it hard to find out what the timestamp for each video is.
• While it does work, it's pretty much still in experimental phase. There's stuff I wanna add to it to make it a little more sophisticated and more usable overall.

Contributing

Feel free to open issues and pull requests! I'm open to suggestions, although I'm still not very skilled at Bash scripting :)