How to join multiple mpeg video files on OSX

Today had a video that was split into 10 smaller mpg video files. The video files were named 0001.mpg, 0002.mpg etc...

I wanted to merge these into a single mpg video file. Seems quite straight forward but I couldn't find an easy way to do this on OSX. I did however find a couple of tricks for joining multiple mpeg video files on Windows. I thought it should be possible to use the same method on OSX so I came up the the equivalent commands for OSX.

Steps to join the mpg files

  1. Ensure the separate movies are sort alphabetically in the order they should be joined 
  2. Open terminal from Applications > Utilities > Terminal
  3. At the prompt change the directory to the folder where your video files are, for example if the movie files are in a folder called 'MyMovie' on your desktop you would type ~/Desktop/MyMovie
  4. At the prompt type the command cat *.mpg > fullmovie.mpg
  5. After a few moments you will see the file fullmovie.mpg appear, if the movies are large it may take a while. With the movie files I was joining the resulting file was just over 2GB and the process took about 20 seconds.
The resulting movie file I was able to open with both VLC and Windows Media Player and watch the movie.