I have several small .avi files of differing resolutions that I want to merge into one larger file.

Having tried several joiners they all have different restrictions, either only joining files of the same resolution, a maximum file size or a maximum of 3 files at a time.

Any recommendations for a free joiner that has no restrictions and isn't a full blown movie editor ?

Massively overkill and you'll no doubt have to speak to Jim but Adobe Premiere Pro would do the job.

My advice would be to first of all re-do them to have the same res. VirtualDubMod can do this by either letterboxing or stretching. If they're short enough, you can re-save them using uncompressed output as well. Then, joining them together should be trivial (again, VirtualDubMod should be able to do this).

Didn't adobe release the licence code to premiere when they 'gave away' photocopy cs2 et al, think Ken had the link somewhere, on my phone atm otherwise I'd post it...

Oh yeah, quite possibly.

this?

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

I think you're supposed to own a license of some kind though

That's the one. 'Supposed to' is a very grey area, 'specially when they're handing it to you on a plate.

Does the Adobe run on W7, might have to have a look.

Was hoping not to have to re-encode as the new .avi's never quite look the same and quality tends to suffer. I tend to use Xmedia Recode which works well but I'll give the VirtualDubMod a try - is it part of VirtualDub as I've been using that to edit the files ?

Do you have the choice of not re encoding if the files are different resolutions? Surely they need to be the same format/res to join without encoding again.

Edit: Or did you mean re-encode them first before joining them? I think you may have in which case what Dave said.

Like I say, depends on the size of the videos. If they're not too huge, you could use the "no compression" option which will give a huge AVI, but means no re-compression of the video stream.

VirtualDubMod is a modified version of VirtualDub which adds a few extra features.

My .avi's are in different resolutions, there are some joiners that will join avis of different resolutions together without re-encoding, ie the resulting big avi will contain clips of various resolutions. But all the joiners of this type I've found have different restrictions (unless you pay for the full version).

I think I'll encode all the files to the same res and then join them after that, unless someone knows a free joiner with no restrictions which joins different resolutions.

Or maybe I'm reading it wrong and they will join avi's of different resolutions but the output file will all be in the same resolution.

I think you are reading it wrong. I'd be highly surprised if there was a joiner that worked in the way you think. Not least because I don't think an AVI can just change resolution on the fly half way through. I think the resolution is probably coded into the header of the file.

You're probably right. I just presumed that because I selected files of differing resolution and clicked 'join' that the output would be of varying resolution.