VLC is best known as a robust media player. Its ability to edit videos has always been underestimated. It is perfect for simple edits. For example, you can use VLC to cut videos, remove audio track from video, convert video from one format to another, take video snapshots, etc. Since VLC is designed as a media player other than an editor, you may find many of its video editing features are not so obvious. Today, we will reveal just another hidden feature of VLC. You can follow the quick steps below to combine two or more video clips into one file using VLC media player on Windows computer.
To merge multiple video files into one using VLC media player, you’ll have to run VLC in the Command Prompt in Windows or Terminal in Mac OS. Here, we’ll show you how to do this on a Windows computer.
Running VLC from the command-line interface gives you access to many commands and features in VLC which you would not otherwise have from the normal user interface.
Contents
- Step 1. check video & audio codecs;
- Step 2. prepare video files;
- Step 3. open Command Prompt;
- Step 4. access the video folder in Command Prompt;
- Step 5. merge videos in VLC from Command Prompt.
- VLC alternative 1 - Merging multiple videos with LosslessCut
- VLC alternative 2 - Combing videos using Format Factory
Step 1. Make sure audio and video codecs are compatible
The audio and video codecs of the source files are compatible with each other. Further, the codecs are also compatible with the container (muxer) that we intend to use for the final file. For example, the source files are video1.mp4, video2.mp4 and you want to merge them into a new mp4 file. They are all mp4 files.
You can find Codec Information for a file in VLC on computer.
If they are in different codec or format, such as a mp4 video and a mov video, you can follow these steps to convert video/audio in VLC.
Step 2. Put all videos together in the same folder
Go to create or select a folder as the working directory where all the videos you intend to combine are saved so VLC can find them in this folder and generate the new merged video there.
In this demo, we created a folder ‘videos’ in the D drive and copied both video files there. Then renamed them to video1.mp4 and video2.mp4.
Step 3. Open Command Prompt in Windows 11 or 10
Click on Start menu. Type Command Prompt in the search bar. The search result page displays. Click on Open or ‘Run as administrator’ in the app options to access the Command Prompt on your PC.
Step 4. Open the folder in Command Prompt
When you first open the Command Prompt, it will open in the user’s home folder, i.e, “C:\Users\Username\” folder. If you open the Command Prompt as an administrator then it will open in the “C:\Windows\system32\” folder. We need to execute a command in the videos’ folder we created above in order to merge the videos into one. Thus we have to first access the folder in Command Prompt.
When we opened Command Prompt on our Windows 11 PC, it opens C:\Users\matt>. Since we created ‘videos’ folder in D drive, we can use following commands to change the directory in Command Prompt.
- type D: and press Enter to change the drive from C to D;
- type “cd videos” without the quotes and press Enter to access the videos folder in D drive.
Note that if the folder path has a space in it, you should enclose it in quotes. We suggest you avoid subfolders and space in folder name to make things as easy as possible.
Step 5. Merge multiple video files with VLC from Command Prompt
Following is the command you will only need to combine two or more videos into one:
VLC-app-location video1.mp4 video2.mp4 --sout "#gather:std{access=file, mux=ts, dst=final.mp4}" --sout-keep
VLC-app-location: replace it with the full path to the vlc.exe file on your PC, such as C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe, D:\programs\vlc\vlc.exe, etc.
Follow these steps to quickly find out the VLC location: Click the Windows Start menu, type “vlc” (without the quotes) in the search bar, click on ‘Open file location’ in the app options, now you should see the vlc.exe file opens and highlighted in Windows File Explorer. You can copy its location from the address bar.
video1.mp4/video2.mp4: the name of the first and second video that you intend to merge.
final.mp4: refers to the destination video file name, VLC will combine the above videos and create this new video file.
We have VLC installed to D:\software\vlc on our PC, so the VLC-app-location is D:\software\vlc\vlc.exe.
D:\software\vlc\vlc.exe video1.mp4 video2.mp4 --sout "#gather:std{access=file, mux=ts, dst=final.mp4}" --sout-keep
Press Enter to execute above command in Command Prompt, a new file named final.mp4 will be created with the two video files by VLC player.
Open the folder to find and play the merged video file see if it can be played properly.
Combing videos using VLC media convertor can be quite tech-savvy for not-so-technical users. There are several free and easier alternatives you can try.
VLC alternative 1 – Merging multiple video files with LosslessCut
LosslessCut is the swiss army knife of lossless video/audio editing for Windows, Mac and Linux. Its free and open source.
Unlike VLC media player, this free software can help us concatenate files in series in a much easier way.
Launch LosslessCut on your computer. If you are on Windows, you can see its home screen like this.
Click Tools from the top menu bar, choose Merge/concatenate files from the drop-down menu list.
Then select and add source video files that you intend to join them together. Use Shift+click or Ctrl+click to choose multiple files and add them into LosslessCut.
The Batch file list displays all videos you have added, click the Merge button.
Now you will have more options to customize. When you are ready, click the Merge button to join all files in the list together into one.
VLC alternative 2 – Combing videos using Format Factory
Format Factory is a free, comprehensive multimedia toolkit. It provides audio and video converter, clipper, joiner, spliter, mixer, video downloader, screen recorder, etc. It has a video joining feature which can help users easily join two or more video files in one video file on computer.
Launch the media program on your PC. Scroll down to find Video Joiner & Clip. Click to open it in a new window. Here you can add source video clips, customize output settings. Click Add File button to browse to the folder where the source videos, movies are saved on your PC and import them into the Video Joiner.
Click OK button to add the videos, save the settings and go back to the main interface of Format Factory as shown in the previous screenshot above. Hit Start button in green at the top control bar as shown in the first screenshot to start joining all selected video clips into one file. The combined video will be saved to the output folder of the media program. From the left end of the taskbar of the program, you can find out the output folder and its location.