Splitting Large AVI and DivX Files
So you've
got a lot of large AVI and/or DivX files lying around. Perhaps you've decided to rip all your DVD's to DivX format to
create a media center with your new Intel Mac mini. But because ripping takes a lot of time and you don't trust HD's,
you also want to back up the ripped movies using that stack of 100 blank CD's your Grandma bought you for Xmas. But
CD's only hold 700MB of data and your Divx files are much larger. How can you easily split the large files into more
manageable (and backup-able) chunks?Enter Explicit, a free open source Cocoa application that provides a very easy interface for doing just that! Here's a screenshot of the interface:
The author of this software used to have a program available called Xmerge, which allowed you to go the opposite direction and merge two or more files together into one large one, but it seems to no longer be available. (Ah...looks like it's an open source Linux application for which he just built a GUI). I have a copy of it on my Panther machine at home and still use it occasionally to combine files.
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So you've got a lot of large AVI and/or DivX files lying around. Perhaps you've decided to rip all your DVD's to DivX format to create a...
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Okay, I'm new on the digitizing video scene, but one simple question, why wouldn't I use quicktime to back up all my stuff? What makes divX better?
March 10 2006 at 5:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyD-Vision is an incredibly useful tool for this and is also free.
March 10 2006 at 3:26 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThis is a useful application if you have been creating DivX file for an Archos device, using it to cut off the first second or so solves a synchronisation problem with some Mac created DivX files.
March 10 2006 at 3:12 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyAny chance we could get a link to his Xmerge build from anyone who has an old copy?
March 10 2006 at 3:05 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply@Joshua
See #3's comment.
If you want to evenly split your movie into 700MB chunks for backup purposes (as indicated in post):
$ split -b 700m very_large.avi vlsplit
Burn.
To put everything back together:
$ cat vlsplit* > very_large.avi
It doesn't get any easier. :-)
Very cool, thanks! I actually need this to split a huge vacation video.
March 10 2006 at 1:43 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyUhm, you can only split it up based on time. So how is this good for backing up onto CDs if you don't know when you've hit 700MB? You need a new example.
March 10 2006 at 1:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyPaul-Michael Bauer: The old ways aren't viewable individually.
March 10 2006 at 12:54 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThe old ways are still the best ways.
$ man split
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