Concatenation friendly video containers?

[macmichael01]

I have a series of folders which contain a set of mkv's, mp4's, m2ts's, or ts's.
It would be nice to perform a cat file1 file2 > out.ext operation on these but
I've read that not all video containers can be concatenated (as I found out with mp4 containers)

Is there a wiki to show which video containers are concatenation friendly?

[Guest]

Transport streams are your best hope but even there you can run into issues with some applications.

[Kurtnoise]

Originally Posted by macmichael01

I've read that not all video containers can be concatenated (as I found out with mp4 containers)

Since when ?

[Guest]

He refers to naive concatenation using DOS copy or equivalent.

[macmichael01]

Originally Posted by Kurtnoise

Since when ?

Since there was this thing called a header. Some video containers do not have such headers which makes it easy to perform a basic cat operation on them. But since some video containers have headers and headers could be located anywhere within a file, a cat operation cannot be used.

If there is a way to strip out such headers when merging into a single container without losing quality, I'd like to know.

I think the solution would be to mux to a ts or m2ts container (as neuron2 suggested) or simply extract the individual audio and video streams then merge them into a container of choice.