- Posted by miketeye on June 25, 2009
Share on FacebookRecently I developed a site which used the JW Player to play some video content hosted by a free video hosting service provider. I hit a brick wall when it was necessary to play an intro clip to each of the movies. The challenge is that although the JW player plays many a variety of xml playlist formats (asx,rss,atom,xspf,smil etc), It does not provide any mechanism for playing a specific intro clip to all entries in the playlist.
I tried to find a solution by going down the line of nested playlists, where I could create a sub playlist if you like, with the intro clip as first entry for each track in the main playlist, but had no joy. Although a few people said the JW Player could play nested xspf playlists, I just didn't have any luck with it.
Free Video Joiner in Action
Finally, I had to go down the route of finding easy to use tools to merge (or prepend as it were) the intro video to the main entries in the playlist before uploading to the hosting provider. At least that works OK and the problem is solved. You might think Windows Movie Maker will be a good candidate software for the task, but I quickly dropped it out of the list because, WMM always re-encoded the final movie into a totally new movie and in the process results in a loss of quality. There was a very helpful tool called free video joiner I used to easily merge the videos, you may download it from the link below:
Download Free Video Joiner
However, as good and easy to use as the above tool is, it does not support merging flvs. Flvs are however the preferred format for video hosting and streaming online, since 95% of all machines and browsers are flash ready. So if you need to merge flvs, are you stuck ? No. You are still in luck (Not like I believe in luck though, but that's a different subject for another day). As it happens, there is Andy's flv Joiner for the task of simply merging multiple flv files into one.
You may Download Andy's flv joiner from here.
I needed to do similar with mp3 audios where I needed to prepend an intro and outro mp3 to the beginning and end respectively of the main clip, the tool that came in handy for the mp3 merger is Free Mp3/WMA/Ogg Converter. You may download the tool from the link below:
Download Free MP3/WMA/OGG Converter
If you want a bit more control at editing and merging mp3 files and want an open source alternative to industry tools like Steinberg's wavelab, then you could try audacity, by downloading it from here.
If you have to rip DVD video from a Disk to your hard drive or change video enconding from say WMV to FLV, then you might want to try eRightSoft's SUPER
Download eRightSoft's Super from here
Hope this helps.