Using MP4Box to concatenate many .h264 files into one MP4 file

The general form of the concatenate command for MP4Box is:

MP4Box -add <filename>.ext -cat <filename>.ext output.ext¹

When you have more than a couple of output files, you’re going to want to automate that -cat part as much as possible because let’s face it, writing out that statement even more than a couple of times will get really old really fast.

The method below works but I’m sure that there is a better way to do it.

1. echo out the command you want to run. In this case:

(echo -n "MP4Box "; for i in *.h264; do echo -n " -cat $i"; done; echo -n " hummingbird.mp4") >> com.txt

1. Edit the file com.txt created in (1) so that you can change the first -cat to -add

vim com.txt

1. While still in vim editing the com.txt file add the #!/bin/sh to the first line. When finished, exit vim²
2. Change the mode of the file so it can run

chmod +x com.txt

1. Run the file:

./com.txt

Why am I doing all of this? I have a Raspberry Pi with a Camera attachment and a motion sensor. I’d like to watch the hummingbirds that come to my hummingbird feeder with it for a day or two and get some sweet video. We’ll see how it goes.

1. The -add will add the \<filename> to the output file while the -cat will add any other files to the output file (all while not overwriting the output file so that the files all get streamed together). ↩︎
2. I’m sure there’s an xkcd comic about this, but I just can’t find it! ↩︎