Fastest way to merge MOV files by using ffmpeg

There was full of sunshine over the week. I wanted to keep some of the video in my dash camera to celebrate summer. The weather was nicely recorded, but it was all saved in separate MOV files for 1 min each. I wanted to combine them into a single file for sharing over YouTube.

Obviously there were bunch of software of doing this, but many of them take too much time for processing. (My CPU fan worked damn hard to cool off). I didn't need to re-encode the files.
There must be some smarter way.

I turned out using ffmpeg. It gave exactly what I needed. The merge of 6 files (6 mins) only took about 1 - 2 mins. This was amazing fast compare with using other software. Thanks ffmpeg!

1. Install ffmpeg (it is free)
2. Copy all the mov files into a new blank folder
3. Create a text file (files.txt) with all the files to be merged in order with the format like this
   
   file 'file1.mov'
   file 'file2.mov'
   file 'file3.mov'
   file 'file4.mov'
   file 'file5.mov'
   file 'file6.mov'
4. Run this command in the folder
   ffmpeg -safe 0 -f concat -i files.txt -vcodec copy -acodec copy merged.MOV
5. The output file merged.mov is ready.

Here is the batch script to do the whole thing nice and easy

@echo off

del merged.mov

del files.txt

for %%i In (*.mov) DO echo file '%%i' >>files.txt

ffmpeg -safe 0 -f concat -i files.txt -vcodec copy merged.MOV

What a lovely day!