So, you have a bunch of .avi video files (from your cell phone, for example) that you'd like to combine into one (so you can upload the collection to YouTube)?

Here are two options on how to do this. The first one uses a tool from the transcode package:

avimerge -i one.avi two.avi three.avi -o output.avi

avimerge is appropriately named, and if it works, it works well. Sometimes, however, it produces out-of-sync audio, which is kind of lame if people are actually, you know, talking in your videos.

Second method to the rescue: mencoder is part of the MPlayer family and can also concatenate avi files:

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy one.avi two.avi three.avi -o output.avi

Note: Both methods are lossless, as neither the video nor audio stream is re-encoded in any way, but they also require all input files to use the same stream formats. If you took the different videos with the same device though, that shouldn't be a problem.

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A while ago, I asked my German readership if they would mind me merging my German and English blog together. For time reasons, my blog output wasn't as high as would be reasonable to fill two blogs with, and furthermore, I often had trouble deciding if I wanted to blog something in my English or rather my German blog.

Fact is, most of my German readers can read English (and don't mind doing so either), while the opposite does not apply.

The German readers (and the English-speaking ones who also understand German) said they wouldn't mind, and encouraged me to do so.

Yet, until now, I didn't find the time to actually do it. Today, I finally merged my two blogs into one, (of course not entirely without problems, I'll blog that in a little while too), and to cut a long story short: Here are the changes that count for you, dear readers:

1. fredericiana.de is now part of fredericiana.com -- all requests to .de get automatically redirected to the appropriate .com site.
2. If you have subscribed to the German feed, please update your feed reader (even if the redirect works fine for now, I can't guarantee that fredericiana.de will always stay a straight redirect to the .com site).
3. If you have subscribed to a specific category only, please adjust your feed URL also.
4. If you cannot or do not want to read one of the two languages, I suggest you filter by the German or English category on the right hand side, respectively (especially when using a feed reader!). Then you should not see the stories anymore in the language you don't want.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you have any comments, or if you notice any unexpected behavior, or whatever else you may have for me, please do not hesitate to leave a comment. Thanks!

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